In 2017, a group of teenage girls from Herat, Afghanistan, became internationally famous for building robots. They called themselves the Afghan Dreamers, and even getting to their first major international competition became a story. Six members of the team had been invited to compete at the FIRST Global Challenge in Washington, D.C., but their U.S. visas were denied twice, despite some of the girls making the long and dangerous journey from Herat to Kabul simply to apply. Their case attracted international attention, and they were eventually allowed into the United States, where they competed and received a medal for courageous achievement.

In the years that followed, they traveled, competed, and won awards, and during the pandemic worked on a low-cost ventilator prototype that could be built from readily available materials, including used Toyota Corolla parts. The team became famous well beyond the world of robotics, in part because these young women offered such a vivid counterargument to the increasingly limited futures being prescribed for Afghan girls.

Then, in 2021, the Taliban returned to power, and the future they had spent years constructing became suddenly and terrifyingly uncertain. Three of the original Afghan Dreamers, Lida Azizi, Fatemah Qaderyan, and Kawsar Roshan, eventually made their way to Ireland. I heard part of that story recently on The World, and of all the extraordinary details involved in escaping a country and beginning a life somewhere else, the one that stayed with me was much smaller.

By then, the girls had spent years traveling the world and interacting with people in power. Their success had put them in rooms with politicians, diplomats, dignitaries, journalists, media personalities, technology leaders, and heads of organizations. They had been celebrated, photographed, invited onto stages, and introduced to people whose entire careers seemed to place them within reach of the institutions that might actually be useful in a crisis. And, as people often do when confronted with an extraordinary young person and an extraordinary story, many had offered some version of the same thing: If you ever need anything, please reach out.

Then they needed something. Not an introduction or a recommendation or help getting into another competition, but help saving their lives. As the Taliban settled in, the girls began going back through that accumulated network and contacting people. They reached out broadly, including to some of the powerful and visible people they had met over the years, but very few responded.

So they kept reaching, including in directions that made considerably less obvious sense. One of the people they contacted was Susan McKeown, an Irish singer-songwriter and artist who founded the Cuala Foundation, a nonprofit rooted in arts, culture, and community in Ireland. McKeown was not a diplomat, an immigration official, a politician, or someone whose professional life had anything obvious to do with Afghanistan. On paper, she was hardly the person you would pick from this extraordinary network as the one most likely to be able to get three young Afghan women out of danger. But they were desperate, and at that point they were reaching for every hand they could find.

Susan answered.

She began making calls. The Cuala Foundation worked with Ireland’s Department of Foreign Affairs to secure special refugee visas, raised money for travel and immediate expenses, and helped the young women and members of their families get to Ireland and begin rebuilding their lives there.

I keep returning to the improbability of that chain of events. These girls had met people with titles, access, and proximity to power, but when their lives actually depended on someone responding, help came from a singer in Ireland whose work had almost nothing to do with the crisis unfolding around them.

Sometimes you reach out to as many hands as you can to see who holds yours back.

We tend to think we know who those people will be. Over years, we assemble an internal understanding of who is dependable, who has told us, explicitly or otherwise, that if we ever really need something, we should call. And yet moments of actual need have a peculiar way of rearranging that list. Someone you were certain would answer doesn’t; someone you barely expected to hear from does.

It would be easy to interpret this entirely as a story about character, to divide the world neatly between people who show up and people who don’t. But one of the things I have always found fascinating about social psychology is how frequently it disrupts our confidence that character explains our behavior nearly as much as we think it does. Circumstance matters enormously, and everyone’s life has dozens of moderating variables at any given time.

In 1973, psychologists John Darley and Daniel Batson conducted an experiment at Princeton Theological Seminary that came to be colloquially known as the “Good Samaritan experiment.” Students were asked to walk to another building to give a short talk. Some were asked to speak about possible careers for seminarians; others were asked to speak about the parable of the Good Samaritan. The researchers then varied how hurried the students believed themselves to be. Some were told they had plenty of time, some that they were right on schedule, and others that they were already late and needed to hurry. On the way to the other building, every student encountered a man slumped in a doorway, coughing and groaning and apparently in need of help.

The subject of the talk made no significant difference in whether they stopped. Neither did the measures of religiosity the researchers had collected beforehand. Time pressure did. Among the students who believed they had plenty of time, 63 percent stopped to help. In the intermediate-hurry condition, 45 percent stopped. Among those who had been told they were already late, only 10 percent did.

There is something darkly funny about rushing past a suffering stranger because you are late to give a talk about the moral obligation to stop for suffering strangers, but the experiment has stayed with me for 20 years because it suggests that the distance between believing ourselves to be helpful people and actually helping can be remarkably small.

Darley and Batson themselves raised an interesting possibility about what hurry does to us. The rushed students may not have consciously decided that arriving on time mattered more than the person in the doorway. Instead, the researchers wondered whether hurry had narrowed their attention enough that the person in distress never fully registered as a situation requiring a response. Busyness, in other words, may alter not only what we choose to do, but what makes it far enough into our attention to become an important question in the first place.

That possibility becomes even more interesting alongside another famous series of experiments Darley conducted with Bibb Latané a few years earlier. In their 1968 study of bystander intervention, college students believed they were participating in a discussion over an intercom when another participant appeared to suffer a seizure. The researchers manipulated how many other people each student believed were listening. When participants thought they alone were witnessing the emergency, they responded more quickly and were substantially more likely to seek help. As the number of apparent witnesses increased, intervention fell.

Darley and Latané described part of what was happening as diffusion of responsibility. If I am the only person who knows you need help, the question of whose responsibility it is has a fairly obvious answer. If five other people know too, responsibility becomes strangely divisible. I can assume someone else is already doing something, someone else knows more than I do, someone else is closer, someone else is better equipped.

The same researchers demonstrated a related and, to me, even stranger phenomenon in another experiment later that year. Male college students sat in a room completing questionnaires when smoke began pouring through a wall vent. When a participant was alone, 75 percent reported the smoke. When he was sitting beside two people who had been instructed by the researchers to remain completely passive, only 10 percent did. In groups of three ordinary participants, 38 percent of the groups reported it.

The smoke experiment suggests that sometimes we aren’t simply assuming someone else will help; we are looking at other people to decide whether help is necessary at all. If smoke is filling a room but everyone around me remains calmly bent over a questionnaire, I begin to wonder whether perhaps I am the one misunderstanding the situation. This is related to what psychologists call pluralistic ignorance: each person takes everyone else’s apparent calm as evidence that nothing is wrong, without realizing that everyone may privately be looking around and thinking some version of the same thing.

These experiments are more than half a century old, and social psychology has given us plenty of reasons to be careful with famous findings that become cleaner and more dramatic in textbooks than they ever were in laboratories. But the broader bystander effect has held up reasonably well. A 2011 meta-analysis examined 105 independent effect sizes representing more than 7,700 participants and found a significant overall bystander effect. Importantly, though, the effect was not universal. It became weaker in dangerous emergencies, particularly when bystanders could provide useful physical support to the person intervening. The more interesting lesson is therefore not simply that groups make us selfish (although yes, kind of), but rather that our willingness to act is remarkably sensitive to the circumstances surrounding the request.

I think there is a modern version of this that extends well beyond strangers gathered around an emergency. The more connected someone appears to be, the easier it can be to assume they are already surrounded by help. The Afghan Dreamers had become internationally known. They had met politicians, journalists, technologists, nonprofit leaders, and advocates; they had competed around the world and attracted enormous media attention. From the outside, they must have looked exceptionally connected. And perhaps that is precisely the kind of person about whom it is easiest to think: surely someone else has this covered.

Someone else sees the smoke. Someone else hears the person calling for help. Someone else is copied on the email. Someone else has more time, more money, more influence, more expertise, more proximity. Surely someone else will answer.

There is another part of this that I have always found particularly uncomfortable, which is what the Good Samaritan experiment suggests about busyness. We generally discuss being busy as a problem of productivity or wellness: what it does to our sleep, our creativity, our attention, our relationships, whether we are exercising enough or spending enough time with the people we love. We talk much less about what it might do to our capacity to be available to one another. I wonder if one of the hidden costs of a relentlessly full and dopamine-chasing life is not simply that we become tired, but that we become harder to interrupt.

Helping, after all, is very often an interruption. It is a phone call that comes while you are working, a friend who needs somewhere to stay during an already chaotic week, an introduction that will require three more emails, someone who needs to talk on the evening you had finally managed to preserve for yourself. The opportunities we have to be useful to one another rarely arrive at the moment when we have conveniently finished everything else. Very few opportunities for generosity arrive neatly calendared between 2:00 and 2:30 PM.

I don’t think the conclusion is that we should answer every request made of us, or that failing to help necessarily reveals something terrible about our character. Sometimes we genuinely cannot help. Sometimes we are the wrong person, lack the resources, or simply have limits that need protecting. In fact, one of the things I find most interesting about the research is that it argues against making character judgments quite so quickly. The seminarian who walked past the man in the doorway may not have been a less compassionate human being than the seminarian who stopped; he may simply have been running late.

I learned about the Good Samaritan experiment in college, and for whatever reason, it lodged itself very deeply. I have tried ever since to leave some room to be interrupted. I don’t always succeed. I have missed calls I should have answered, been too busy when someone needed me, postponed things I shouldn’t have postponed. But the framework has stayed with me: I don’t want to build a life so optimized, scheduled, or protected that there is no room left for the unexpected needs of other people. The times in my life when that has been the case, I’ve been the worst for it.

Maybe that is why the story of the Afghan Dreamers stood out to me. Sometimes you reach out to as many hands as you can to see who holds yours back. And it seems worth occasionally asking ourselves whether we have left enough room in our own lives to be the person who does.

This Month’s Nudge: Put Yourself in the Way of Joy

We talk about happiness as though it is both a reasonable expectation and a useful measure of a life. Are you happy? Does this make you happy? Will you be happier if you leave the job, move to the city, marry the person, buy the house, change the thing? Happiness has somehow become both destination and diagnostic, a way of deciding not only how we feel, but whether we are living correctly.

This has always struck me as an enormous amount of responsibility to place on one emotion. Kate Bowler’s latest book, Joyful, Anyway, offers a distinction I find much more useful: happiness and joy are not the same thing. Happiness is highly cooperative with circumstance. It is much easier to be happy when the people we love are well, work is going well, our relationships feel intact, and life is generally behaving itself.

Joy is far less obedient. It appears at deeply inconvenient times. You can be grieving and laugh so hard you can’t breathe. You can be terrified about the future and have an absolutely perfect afternoon. You can be heartbroken and still be stunned by a song, an unexpected conversation, the particular color of the sky, some completely ridiculous thing your friend says at precisely the wrong moment. Joy does not require suffering to leave the room before it enters (this is, by the way, the best part).

Psychology has spent a surprisingly long time trying to define what, exactly, constitutes a good life. One of its foundational distinctions is between hedonic well-being and eudaimonic well-being: roughly, a life organized around pleasure, positive emotion, and satisfaction versus one concerned with meaning, purpose, growth, and becoming fully oneself.

More recently, psychologists Shigehiro Oishi and Erin Westgate have argued that we are missing a third possibility: the psychologically rich life, one full of experiences that are interesting, complex, novel, and perspective-changing. One crucially important flag: those experiences do not have to be pleasant.

This resonates for me because some of the experiences that have enlarged my life the most would perform rather badly on a happiness questionnaire. Difficult travel. Starting things I had absolutely no idea how to do. Relationships that changed me but did not last. Getting spectacularly lost. Physical challenges and adventures that, in the moment, involved a fair amount of questioning my own judgment. Even failure, although I reserve the right to appreciate that one primarily in retrospect.

Oishi and Westgate found that happiness, meaning, and psychological richness overlap, but people recognize them as distinct ingredients of a good life. Even more interestingly, when people were forced to choose, a meaningful minority said they would take a psychologically richer life even at the expense of some happiness or meaning.

That complicates the question Am I happy? but who are we to shy away from some useful complication?

This thread of reasoning also assumes that happiness is the emotional state against which everything else should be measured, but there is some provocative research suggesting that emotional variety itself may matter more. Researchers have borrowed the language of biodiversity to study “emodiversity,” essentially the range and relative abundance of emotions a person experiences. One large study of more than 37,000 people found associations between greater emotional diversity and better mental and physical health, even after accounting for average levels of positive and negative emotion. The methodology behind some of those findings has subsequently been debated, so I would not take this as an instruction to deliberately diversify your misery, but I do find the underlying question fascinating: what if emotional health is not the same thing as maximizing the amount of time we feel good?

Perhaps sadness, awe, longing, amusement, grief, tenderness, frustration, curiosity, and joy are not competing for a single emotional seat, but filling out the room of a fully lived life with a much stranger mixture.

There is another branch of research that makes Bowler’s idea resonate. Psychologist Fred Bryant has spent decades studying something called savoring: our ability to notice, appreciate, and extend positive experiences. Savoring is not the positive experience itself; it is the dance we do with it.

We can savor something before it happens through anticipation, while it is happening by paying attention to it, and after it is over through memory. We can tell someone about it, mentally photograph it, return to it later, linger in it. Research on savoring interventions has found modest but significant improvements in positive emotion and life satisfaction.

This suggests that the amount of joy available to us and the amount of joy we actually experience are not necessarily identical: two people can have the same beautiful afternoon and extract entirely different amounts of life from it. One may already be thinking about tomorrow, checking her phone, mentally moving on to the next thing; the other notices that this is good while it is still happening, she tells someone about it afterward and years later still remembers it. The external event was the same; the psychological footprint was not.

Bowler uses a phrase I love: “putting yourself in the way of joy.” Not manufacturing it. Not demanding it. Certainly not pretending everything is wonderful when it very much is not. In Joyful, Anyway, she writes about loosening our grip on control, introducing novelty, choosing generosity, and remaining open to surprise. Joy, in her formulation, is both something that finds us and something we can make ourselves more available to.

Perhaps the best part is that none of this requires overhauling your life. In fact, Bowler’s argument pushes against our tendency to turn everything into another self-improvement project. Joy doesn’t require everything to get better first. It can exist alongside grief, disappointment, boredom, uncertainty, even a life that looks very different from the one we thought we were going to have.

I suspect many of us inadvertently move in the opposite direction. As life becomes more demanding, we become increasingly efficient at eliminating precisely the things that are unnecessary: the wandering conversation, the ridiculous hobby, the afternoon with no particular purpose, the detour, the person who makes us laugh but with whom we accomplish absolutely nothing. We protect our time, optimize our calendars, become very responsible adults, and occasionally optimize ourselves right out of delight.

So, this month’s nudge is an experiment: identify three places where joy reliably seems to find you, and deliberately put yourself in their way.

Not three things that are good for you. Not three things you think you should enjoy. Three things that have a peculiar habit of making you feel delighted, absorbed, surprised, amused, alive. Then make room for them.

And when joy does show up, resist the impulse to immediately move on. Stay for an extra ten minutes. Tell someone about it. Take the long way home. Put the phone away. Let yourself anticipate it beforehand and remember it afterward.

Happiness is far too large a project for September, but joy seems like a very good place to start.

Creative Curiosities: The Postcard

I still send postcards.

I know this puts me in an increasingly minuscule group of nostalgic, slightly impractical people. Sometimes I buy them wherever I happen to be, but I also make my own from photographs I take while traveling. I find it immensely gratifying to turn a photograph that would otherwise live somewhere among the approximately nine million images on my phone into a physical object, a shared moment with an actual destination.

I had always thought of postcards mostly as charming, increasingly obsolete forms of communication until I heard a story about them last month on The Intelligence. It sent me down a much-welcome rabbit hole into their history, which is considerably stranger and more consequential than I realized.

Historian Lydia Pyne has called the postcard the world’s first global social network. At first I thought that was clever phrasing more than anything else, but the analogy holds up surprisingly well. Postcards were cheap, visual, public-ish, collectible, easy to circulate, and constrained in how much you could say. They carried vacation photographs, yes, but also jokes, political messages, advertisements, art, gossip, news, pornography, propaganda. People collected and displayed them. There were postcard clubs. Postcard crazes. Millions of them traveled around the world every year at the height of their popularity.

It is interesting to think about what that meant at a time when seeing an image of somewhere else was itself remarkable. We now encounter so many images of places before actually going to them that arrival can occasionally feel like recognition. Of course the Eiffel Tower looks like that. Of course Santorini is white and blue. Of course the Maldives have that particular shade of impossible water. But postcards were part of the machinery that first taught enormous numbers of people what elsewhere looked like.

And not just what it looked like, but what was worth looking at.

Certain beaches. Certain monuments. Certain streets. Specific details. Places developed visual identities that could be reproduced thousands or millions of times and sent around the world. Eventually the language became so recognizable that it could be parodied. You can still picture one of those enormous-lettered “Greetings From...” postcards without my having to show you one.

But the story that really sent me investigating happened during World War II.

In March 1942, Britain was thinking seriously about the enormous problem of how one might eventually invade Nazi-occupied Europe. Military planners needed detailed information about coastlines they could no longer simply go and inspect, so an appeal went out asking ordinary British people to send in photographs and postcards from their prewar holidays.

I keep imagining receiving this request. Somewhere in a drawer is the postcard you bought on a beach holiday years earlier, something so ordinary you may have forgotten you owned it, and suddenly British intelligence would quite like to have a look.

The public response was extraordinary. Around 30,000 items reportedly arrived in the first post alone, and the collection assembled for wartime intelligence eventually grew to millions of photographs and postcards.

What civilians saw as vacation snapshots, intelligence officers could read differently. A beach had a gradient. A seawall had a height. A road disappeared behind a building and emerged somewhere useful. The landscape in the background revealed terrain. Images taken without any strategic intention whatsoever contained information precisely because no one had thought of them as intelligence when they were made. These ordinary souvenirs became part of the vast accumulation of mapping, reconnaissance, and intelligence eventually used in preparation for D-Day.

The accidental usefulness feels wildly extraordinary: an object can contain information its maker didn’t know they were recording. Someone can stand on a beach and photograph something beautiful, and years later another person can look at the exact same image and see military geography.

Meanwhile, after spending the better part of a century circulating, postcards are disappearing. We obviously haven’t stopped sending one another photographs; in fact, we have become almost absurdly good at it. A person can see what I am eating, where I am swimming, what I am reading, and the view outside my hotel room while I am still experiencing all four. First-Class Mail volume in the United States has fallen by roughly half since 2008, and stamped postcard volume has fallen by almost 90 percent since the late 1990s.

There is no mystery as to why. Postcards are objectively terrible technology if the goal is simply to transmit an image and a message. They are slow. They get lost. You need a stamp. You need an address. You have to find somewhere to mail the thing. I have carried postcards across multiple countries because I kept forgetting to send them or couldn’t find anywhere to easily buy a stamp, which somewhat undermines the premise of the postcard.

And still, I love them. Maybe this is simply nostalgia for physical things, but I think there is also something about the specificity of a postcard that serves as a nice reminder of the intentionality we’ve lost in digital sharing.

If you’re intrigued to do any of this, draw your own postcard (use these) or print one of your own photographs and stick a postcard backing onto it (I use something like these).

Morsel of Inspiration

“When I am thickening my plots, I like to think, 'What if…what if…?' Thus, my imagination can move from the likely, which everyone can think of, to the unlikely-but-possible, my preferred plot.”

— Patricia Highsmith

Until next time, stay wide.

Courage by any other name…

I’ve always loved that Gibran begins with an invitation instead of a promise. He doesn’t tell us that love will make us happy, safe, fulfilled. He beckons us to follow it, while warning us that the road ahead will be more of a Type II Fun adventure.

Another favorite (and very astute) observation comes courtesy of James Baldwin, who once wrote, “Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.” We are often sold an additive version of love in which our lives are meant to be endlessly enhanced by who and what we love, but Baldwin advises us that love strips things away: it dismantles the identities we’ve carefully built, it asks us to be before we feel ready to be, it exposes our fears, our defenses, and all the ways we’ve learned to get by, to excel, to hide.

That is brave work.

I don’t think either Gibran or Baldwin is writing only about romantic love, or at least, that’s never been how I’ve read them. The older I get, the more I believe life asks us to fall in love over and over again: with people, certainly, but also with places, communities, ideas, meaningful work, even sometimes with a version of ourselves or others, or a future we can barely imagine. At no point, notably, is there a promise of comfort or ease. Quite the opposite: the suggestion is that that love's first task is transformation. It crowns us, yes, but it also prunes us.

Ultimately, it is wildly and deeply courageous to love anything, anyone, any moment. Through the lens of poetry, art, and any other contemplative or artistic tradition, it is arguably the only way to not just survive, but to thrive amidst the costs and often hidden rewards of loving. Perhaps this is why any love feels so risky: not simply because we might lose the person, the place, or the dream, although of course we might, but because every genuine love changes us, and we never entirely know who we’ll be on the other side of that transformation.

Most of us spend years believing courage looked like achievement, endurance, competence, or certainty, when maybe courage is the willingness to keep loving. To keep saying yes to the things that make us come alive, despite knowing they may one day break our hearts. Maybe it’s resisting the temptation to become cynical after disappointment. Maybe it’s continuing to trust, to build, to hope, to care deeply, in a world that gives us plenty of reasons not to.

I understand why so many people choose self-protection. There is safety in staying detached, in caring just a little less, in convincing ourselves the “right” road will be easy and smooth. But I also think there’s a cost to that kind of living. A heart can break from loving, but a life can wither from never risking heartbreak at all.

Perhaps that’s what Gibran meant all along: love is not a reward for courage; love is what requires it.

Listenin’ & Readin’

Because sometimes a good paragraph hits harder than a green juice.

📚 Frank Dikötter — Red Dawn Over China: How Communism Conquered a Quarter of Humanity
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I just finished this book, so it is fresh in recent memory. History has a way of hardening into inevitability: once we know how a story ends, we begin telling it as though it could never have unfolded any other way. This book challenges that, drawing on archival material from China, Russia, Europe, and the United States to argue that the Chinese Communist Party’s rise to power was far less inevitable than many of us have been taught, shaped not only by internal dynamics but also by Soviet support, wartime conditions, and a series of contingent political decisions. Whether or not you agree with all of Dikötter’s conclusions, the book serves as a powerful reminder that history is rarely as linear or predetermined as it appears in hindsight. It left me thinking less about twentieth-century China than about the stories we tell ourselves more broadly. How often do we mistake outcomes for destiny?

🧠 Hidden Brain — “A Secret Source of Connection”
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One of the central ideas in this episode is something psychologist Amit Kumar calls the “prosociality paradox.” Most of us genuinely want to be kind. We want to check in on the friend going through a divorce, tell a colleague we admire their work, write the thank-you note, or offer to help the stranger struggling with groceries. Yet, remarkably often, we don’t. Not because we don’t care, but because we overestimate how awkward our kindness will feel and underestimate how much it will matter to the person receiving it. Research consistently shows that recipients value these gestures far more than we expect, while we become preoccupied with whether we’re saying exactly the right thing. It made me wonder how many meaningful moments of connection never happen because both people are waiting for the other to make the first move. In a world where loneliness has become one of our defining public health challenges, perhaps courage doesn’t always look like grand gestures. Sometimes it looks like sending the text, making the call, expressing the gratitude, or offering the help before you’ve had time to overthink it.

📰 The Brookings Institution — “Delivering the Vote: How Four Pressures Are Testing the Postal Service’s Role in American Elections”
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On its surface, this article examines the increasingly complicated role of the U.S. Postal Service in American elections. Beneath that, however, it’s really an essay about institutional design. The authors explore how legal changes, political expectations, operational constraints, and public trust have gradually expanded what we ask of the Postal Service, often without expanding its resources or redefining its mandate. Reading it, I found myself thinking about organizations far beyond government. One of the easiest mistakes leaders make is asking institutions to solve problems they were never designed to solve. Sometimes we respond by blaming the people inside them, when the deeper issue is that we’ve changed the job description without changing the system. It’s a thoughtful reminder that before asking whether an institution is succeeding or failing, we should first ask whether we’re evaluating it against the purpose it was actually built to serve.

📚 Rick Ridgeway — Life Lived Wild
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Part memoir, part adventure story, and part meditation on conservation, Life Lived Wild traces Rick Ridgeway’s remarkable life through mountaineering, exploration, and decades helping shape Patagonia’s environmental philosophy. What stayed with me was not just the love of adventure for the sake if itself, but his evolving understanding of curiosity, stewardship, and what it means to spend a lifetime in relationship with the natural world. It’s ultimately less a book about climbing mountains than about allowing the places we encounter to reshape how we think, what we value, and who we become.

🎙️ Freakonomics Radio — “The World Is Still Drowning in Sludge”
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One of the best conversations I’ve heard recently about bureaucracy and systems thinking. “Sludge” refers to the unnecessary friction embedded in everyday life: paperwork, administrative hurdles, confusing digital interfaces, redundant approvals, and countless small inefficiencies that quietly consume time, energy, and attention. The episode explores why these systems persist despite their obvious costs and argues that removing friction can often create more value than building something entirely new. It’s a fascinating lens through which to think about organizations, governments, and even our own personal workflows.

📰 The New Yorker — “Jürgen Habermas Defended Reason in a Darkening Age”
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At the center of Jürgen Habermas’ philosophy is a deceptively simple idea: democracy depends not only on institutions, but on our capacity to reason together. Throughout his career, Habermas argued that healthy societies require a vibrant public sphere where ideas can be challenged, disagreement is expected, and better arguments have the opportunity to prevail. Reason, in his view, wasn’t merely an intellectual virtue. It was a democratic one.

This profile explores that lifelong commitment against the backdrop of today’s increasingly fragmented information landscape. Rather than focusing solely on political outcomes, it asks what happens when the conditions that make meaningful public discourse possible begin to erode. Social media, algorithmic incentives, and ideological polarization have changed not only what we know, but how we engage with one another. It’s an excellent introduction to one of the twentieth century’s most influential political philosophers and a thoughtful reminder that democracy is sustained as much by the quality of our conversations as by the systems that govern them.

This Month’s Nudge: Congruence

Over the past year, I’ve spent a lot of time discussing, writing about, and processing stress. Work/unemployment, financial strain, illness, heartbreak, caregiving, and uncertainty are acute sources of stress, and decades of research have established that they take a profound psychological and physiological toll. But research also points to another layer we don’t talk about nearly as often: the cumulative exhaustion of living out of alignment with ourselves.

Carl Rogers, one of the founders of humanistic psychology, called it congruence: the alignment between our inner experience and the life we’re actually living. When those two drift apart, he believed we begin to experience mounting psychological tension. More recent research on authenticity has reached similar conclusions: people who report living in greater alignment with their values and sense of self also tend to report higher well-being and lower psychological distress.

That doesn’t mean authenticity is a cure for stress (it certainly isn’t), but it does suggest that living at odds with ourselves carries a cost.

The more I sit with that idea, the more I notice how rarely incongruence announces itself dramatically. Most of the time it looks remarkably ordinary, like saying yes because disappointing someone feels harder than disappointing yourself, chasing a definition of success because of sunk cost, or editing parts of your personality depending on who’s in the room and convincing yourself that the things that make you feel most alive are indulgent because they don’t fit neatly onto a résumé.

None of those choices are catastrophic. In fact, many of them are understandable. We all make compromises. We all play different roles in different contexts. Our lives are often defined more by the trade-offs we make than the active choices we pursue. The question isn’t whether compromise is ever necessary; it’s whether, over time, we’ve become so accustomed to negotiating with ourselves that we no longer notice we’re doing it.

It may just be that most useful questions we can ask ourselves aren’t Am I happy? or even, Am I successful? It’s something simpler: where is there a gap between what I say I value and how I’m actually living?

Not because closing that gap will solve every problem. Life will always contain unavoidable suffering and complexity. We are deeply flawed and will continue to make mistakes, big and small. But if we’re carrying both the weight of life’s inevitable challenges and the additional weight of pretending, pleasing, suppressing, or performing, perhaps we’re making the journey heavier (and more Sisyphean) than it already needs to be.

And so, this month’s nudge is subtle: an invitation notice where you’ve been negotiating against yourself. The smallest act of congruence, saying the honest thing, making the decision you’ve been avoiding, returning to something you’ve quietly missed, doesn’t remove the stress around you. But it can remove the stress of carrying two versions of yourself at once.

Creative Curiosities

The Childhood Paintings of Great Artists

Carl Jung wrote that the second half of life has a different psychological task than the first. “Life really does begin at forty. Up until then, you are just doing research.” The first half is often spent building a life, but the second is spent becoming more fully yourself. If that’s true, then what does the first half actually hint at us becoming?

I recently came across a collection of childhood paintings by artists we now think of as great masters. I wasn’t expecting to find masterpieces. Quite the opposite: I expected awkward proportions, uneven brushstrokes, copied compositions, and the kind of technical mistakes every child makes. What I was curious about were the seeds. Not evidence of genius, but evidence of curiosity. A particular way of looking at the world, of processing the subjects that seemed to pull at them before they had the skill to fully express why, perhaps a willingness to attempt things beyond their ability, choosing to make something imperfect rather than waiting until they were capable of making it well.

Michelangelo’s earliest known painting, completed when he was around twelve or thirteen, is The Torment of Saint Anthony. It wasn’t an original composition. He copied it from an engraving by the German artist Martin Schongauer, just as countless young artists learned by copying masters before them. But Michelangelo reportedly went to the fish market to study real fish so he could paint the demons’ scales more accurately. Even at that age, he was drawn to twisting bodies, movement, anatomy, and physical struggle, and those fascinations never left him…decades later, evidence of that would cover the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

Salvador Dalí’s earliest surviving oil painting is almost surprising in its normalcy. Painted when he was still a young boy, it depicts a quiet landscape near his hometown of Figueres. There is nothing surreal about it: no impossible dreamscapes or melting clocks, just a careful observation of an ordinary place.

Before Claude Monet transformed the way we think about light, he spent his teenage years drawing caricatures of teachers, neighbors, and local personalities in Le Havre. They were humorous, exaggerated, and popular enough that people actually bought them.

Edward Hopper’s earliest surviving drawing appears on the back of a school report card. He was only nine years old. It shows a solitary child standing alone, and while no one should pretend that a single childhood drawing predicts an entire career, it’s difficult not to notice the emotional atmosphere. Hopper would go on to paint some of the loneliest images in American art, finding beauty in silence, empty spaces, and people who seemed lost in thought.

Pablo Picasso painted his first oil painting, The Little Yellow Picador, when he was about eight years old. It depicts a bullfighter on horseback, a scene taken directly from the culture that surrounded his childhood in Málaga. The proportions are imperfect, the perspective uncertain, but the energy is unmistakable. Even then, he wasn’t afraid to tackle movement, spectacle, and action, and he approached the canvas with the confidence of someone who had no interest in waiting until he was ready.

Frida Kahlo’s earliest surviving self-portraits came before the flower crowns, monkeys, and symbolism that most of us immediately associate with her. Yet even then she repeatedly returned to the same subject: herself. Her own face became the place where she explored identity, emotion, physical pain, and belonging. She would spend the rest of her life asking those questions through paint.

Long before The Kiss, Gustav Klimt filled pages with painstaking academic studies of architecture, drapery, and the human figure. They are surprisingly restrained, almost technical. They may even reveal the first signs of an artist willing to spend years mastering the fundamentals before developing the decorative style that would eventually make him famous.

Artemisia Gentileschi grew up in her father’s workshop, where learning to paint was part of everyday life. Her earliest surviving works already reveal an attraction to dramatic storytelling and emotionally charged figures. Those interests would later culminate in paintings like Judith Slaying Holofernes, where narrative, power, and psychological intensity take center stage.

Looking across all of these paintings, I wasn’t struck by how talented these children were. I was struck by how persistent their attention often was. Again and again, they returned to certain subjects, certain questions, certain ways of seeing. Bodies. Faces. Solitude. Landscapes. Drama. Identity. Observation. Their technical ability changed enormously over time, but the direction of their curiosity often remained remarkably consistent.

Perhaps that’s what we’re really seeing in these childhood works: not evidence that greatness was inevitable, but the earliest traces of a lifelong conversation. The paintings themselves may be imperfect, but the attention behind them already feels deeply recognizable. It makes me wonder how many of us have been leaving similar clues all along, not in paintings necessarily, but in the things we read, notice, collect, photograph, write about, and keep returning to.

Morsel of Inspiration

“In the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable, we come to understand that here, in this life, all symphonies remain unfinished."

— Karl Rahner

Until next time, stay wide.

Widen Your Life

We tend to think of growth as a process of becoming more certain. We choose a direction, define a goal, accumulate expertise, and gradually reduce the number of unknowns between where we are and where we hope to end up. It is an intuitive model, and in many domains, an effective one. Expertise compounds, repetition produces mastery, and focus remains one of the clearest predictors of exceptional performance.

That said, some of the most consequential changes in our lives seem to arise through a very different mechanism. They occur not because uncertainty has been eliminated, but because we have deliberately increased our exposure to it.

Looking back, the moments that have most altered the trajectory of my own life rarely began as carefully engineered decisions. They began with conversations that lasted longer than expected, introductions that seemed incidental at the time, experiences that shocked or redirected my thinking, projects I never intended to pursue for long, or places I almost didn’t visit. None of these experiences announced themselves as pivotal. Their significance only became visible in retrospect, once enough time had passed to see what they had set in motion.

This way of thinking is consistent with Nassim Taleb’s idea of optionality. Throughout his work, Taleb argues that although we cannot reliably predict where the greatest opportunities will come from, we can meaningfully increase our exposure to them. He posits that we benefit less from pursuing a narrow goal, and more from increasing our surface area exposure to positive upside… In other words, make choices and take actions that increase your chances of being lucky. a

The objective is not to chase randomness for its own sake, nor to abandon focus altogether. It is to build a life with enough intellectual, professional, and social breadth that unexpected upside has somewhere to emerge. The random Zoom call, the invitation you almost decline, the article outside your usual interests, the fellowship you are unsure you’re qualified for. Most will amount to very little. A small number will change everything. The difficulty, of course, is that we almost never know which is which in advance.

I’m placing this alongside John Salvatier’s essay, Reality Has a Surprising Amount of Detail. Salvatier’s observation is that abstractions are necessary, but they are also compressions of reality. They allow us to navigate an impossibly complex world by simplifying it, yet in doing so they systematically discard information. A city becomes its reputation. A profession becomes its title. A person becomes a first impression. An organization becomes its website. These abstractions are useful, but they are incomplete. Only proximity restores the detail that abstraction inevitably removes.

That distinction feels increasingly important in a world where much of our understanding is mediated through headlines, algorithms, summaries, and other people’s interpretations. We can consume an extraordinary amount of information while having remarkably little direct contact with the things we believe we understand. Familiarity begins to masquerade as knowledge. Opinion becomes easier than observation. We mistake the map for the territory.

Taken together, Taleb’s and Salvatier’s ideas suggest that optionality is about more than increasing the likelihood of fortunate outcomes. It is also a mechanism for improving the accuracy of our mental models. Every unfamiliar place, difficult conversation, new discipline, or unexpected collaboration introduces information that our existing worldview could not have generated on its own. Exposure does not simply create opportunity; it updates and widens understanding.

Interestingly, recent neuroscience points in a similar direction. Research on the anterior mid-cingulate cortex (aMCC), a region associated with persistence, effort allocation, and cognitive control, has found that individuals who consistently engage in voluntary challenge often show greater structural development in this area. One of the papers that first brought this research to a broader audience is aptly titled The Tenacious Brain. It explores the idea that the aMCC may function as a kind of neural engine for persistence, helping explain why some individuals are better able to sustain effort, tolerate discomfort, and continue pursuing long-term goals despite setbacks. Even more compelling is the possibility that this relationship is not fixed. Rather than simply being born with a more developed aMCC, repeatedly engaging in meaningful challenges may help strengthen it over time.

Researchers are still working to establish the direction of causality, but that hypothesis alone has profound implications. If it holds, then persistence is not merely a personality trait or an innate advantage. It is, at least in part, something we can cultivate through repeated engagement with difficult, worthwhile pursuits.

What I find most interesting is the nature of the challenge itself. The experiences associated with these findings are not simply the hardships that life imposes upon us, but the ones we willingly choose. Learning a language in adulthood, training for an endurance race, writing a book, starting a company, moving to a new country, or committing to a creative practice with no guarantee that anyone will ever see the finished work all demand sustained engagement with uncertainty. The common thread is not difficulty alone, but the repeated decision to continue despite discomfort, ambiguity, and the absence of immediate reward.

There is something innately hopeful about that possibility. We often think of resilience as a trait that reveals itself when circumstances become difficult, as though it were largely fixed but latent. This research suggests a more dynamic reality: the willingness to repeatedly choose experiences that stretch our current capabilities may not simply demonstrate resilience; it may grow it.

Taken together, these ideas stand to reshape how we think about progress. We often measure growth by asking whether we are moving more efficiently toward the life we planned. There is another question that seems equally important: are we building a life that continually exposes us to people, ideas, places, and experiences capable of changing the plan itself?

The two are not the same: one optimizes for execution, the other optimizes for discovery. And increasingly, I suspect that many of the most meaningful things in life are found not by narrowing our world, but by widening it.

Listenin’ & Readin’

Because sometimes a good paragraph hits harder than a green juice.

🎙️ The Curiosity Shop — “Sports as Leadership Theater & Recognizing Near Enemies”
Listen here

This conversation focuses on the distinction between far enemies and near enemies, a concept borrowed from Buddhist philosophy. Our far enemies are easy to identify. The near enemies are much more dangerous because they masquerade as the virtues we aspire to. Discipline becomes rigidity. Generosity becomes martyrdom or control. Confidence becomes arrogance. Empathy becomes pity. The conversation explores how these subtle distortions show up in leadership, relationships, and organizations, and why the greatest threats to our values often don’t come from their opposites, but from their convincing imitations. It’s one of those frameworks that quietly changes how you evaluate your own behavior long after the episode ends.

📚 Rick Ridgeway — Life Lived Wild
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Part memoir, part adventure story, and part meditation on conservation, Life Lived Wild traces Rick Ridgeway’s remarkable life through mountaineering, exploration, and decades helping shape Patagonia’s environmental philosophy. What stayed with me was not just the love of adventure for the sake if itself, but his evolving understanding of curiosity, stewardship, and what it means to spend a lifetime in relationship with the natural world. It’s ultimately less a book about climbing mountains than about allowing the places we encounter to reshape how we think, what we value, and who we become.

🎙️ Freakonomics Radio — “The World Is Still Drowning in Sludge”
Listen here

One of the best conversations I’ve heard recently about bureaucracy and systems thinking. “Sludge” refers to the unnecessary friction embedded in everyday life: paperwork, administrative hurdles, confusing digital interfaces, redundant approvals, and countless small inefficiencies that quietly consume time, energy, and attention. The episode explores why these systems persist despite their obvious costs and argues that removing friction can often create more value than building something entirely new. It’s a fascinating lens through which to think about organizations, governments, and even our own personal workflows.

📰 The New Yorker — “Jürgen Habermas Defended Reason in a Darkening Age”
Read here

At the center of Jürgen Habermas’ philosophy is a deceptively simple idea: democracy depends not only on institutions, but on our capacity to reason together. Throughout his career, Habermas argued that healthy societies require a vibrant public sphere where ideas can be challenged, disagreement is expected, and better arguments have the opportunity to prevail. Reason, in his view, wasn’t merely an intellectual virtue. It was a democratic one.

This profile explores that lifelong commitment against the backdrop of today’s increasingly fragmented information landscape. Rather than focusing solely on political outcomes, it asks what happens when the conditions that make meaningful public discourse possible begin to erode. Social media, algorithmic incentives, and ideological polarization have changed not only what we know, but how we engage with one another. It’s an excellent introduction to one of the twentieth century’s most influential political philosophers and a thoughtful reminder that democracy is sustained as much by the quality of our conversations as by the systems that govern them.

🧠 Hidden Brain — “Unleashing Your Creativity”
Listen here

Creativity is frequently described as a talent, something people either possess or they don’t. This episode argues for a much more interesting model. Drawing from psychology and neuroscience, it explores creativity as a process that depends on curiosity, experimentation, and a willingness to remain with uncertainty long enough for new ideas to emerge. One of the strongest themes is that originality rarely arrives fully formed. It is usually the product of producing many imperfect ideas before discovering the exceptional one. Whether you’re an artist, entrepreneur, researcher, or simply trying to solve difficult problems, it’s an excellent exploration of how creative thinking actually develops.

This Month’s Nudge: The Geography of Attention

Attention has become one of the defining resources of modern life. We usually talk about it in terms of scarcity: how to protect it from distraction, reclaim it from our devices, or focus it more effectively. What we talk about far less is its geography. Where does our attention actually go, and what does that distribution of attention do to us over time?

This question has stayed with me over the past few weeks because I kept encountering it from different directions. The first was an essay by Zuhdé titled You Know Every Global Crisis But Nothing About Your Neighborhood. The title is intentionally provocative, but the argument is not anti-globalization, nor is it an argument against being informed. Instead, it asks whether the scale at which we consume information has become increasingly disconnected from the scale at which we actually participate in life.

For most of human history, these two scales were largely the same. We knew our neighbors because they were our community. We understood local issues because they directly shaped our lives. We developed relationships with the people, institutions, and landscapes around us because those were the environments in which we spent our time. Today, that equation has fundamentally changed. Before breakfast, many of us have already consumed news from multiple continents, followed the lives of people we’ll never meet, and formed opinions about places we’ve never visited. At the same time, there may be a park a mile away we’ve never walked through, a local business we’ve never entered, or a neighbor whose name we don’t know.

Reading the essay, I realized the point wasn’t that our attention has become global. That’s one of the extraordinary privileges of the modern world. It’s that our participation hasn’t kept pace. We know more than any generation before us, but much of that knowledge exists at a distance. We observe far more than we inhabit.

That idea reminded me of Nadia Asparouhova’s essay Being basic as a virtue, which arrives at a surprisingly similar conclusion from a different starting point. Nadia argues that many of us have come to undervalue ordinary life. We chase novelty, optimization, and exceptional experiences while overlooking the practices that have quietly anchored human lives for generations: cooking for friends, becoming a regular somewhere, learning a craft, walking through the same neighborhood often enough that it begins to feel like an extension of ourselves. Somewhere along the way, “basic” became synonymous with unimaginative, when in reality many of the experiences that give life depth are fundamentally ordinary.

Placed alongside one another, these essays suggest something larger: attention is not simply a cognitive resource, it is also an investment. Over time, we become attached to whatever consistently receives it. The people we know best are the people we’ve repeatedly paid attention to. The cities we love are usually the ones we’ve spent time exploring rather than merely reading about. The same is true of neighborhoods, communities, and even ideas. Attention accumulates into familiarity, familiarity into understanding, and understanding into belonging.

This is remarkably consistent with decades of research in environmental psychology on sense of place, the emotional bond people develop with their physical surroundings. That bond doesn’t emerge because a place is objectively remarkable. It develops through repeated interaction, memory, participation, and care. Belonging is less a feeling we stumble upon than a relationship we gradually build.

I’ve been wondering whether one of the unintended consequences of living in a world of infinite information is that our attention has become increasingly planetary while our sense of belonging has become increasingly fragile. We know how to follow events unfolding thousands of miles away, yet many of us struggle to feel rooted in the places where our own lives are unfolding. Awareness has expanded dramatically. Attachment hasn’t necessarily expanded with it.

There is no tension between caring deeply about the wider world and becoming deeply rooted in the place you call home. If anything, the two reinforce one another. The broader our perspective becomes, the more important it is to remain connected to a community where our attention translates into participation rather than observation.

I’ve found myself thinking differently about what it means to know a place. Not simply recognizing its streets or restaurants, but understanding its history, noticing what changes from season to season, becoming familiar enough that people begin to recognize you in return. Those are small acts, but they compound. They create a life that is not only informed, but inhabited.

Perhaps the geography of our attention ultimately becomes the geography of our lives.

Creative Curiosities

Einstein Didn’t Just Change Physics; He Changed How We Think About Curiosity.

Einstein was famously skeptical of the idea that his achievements came from extraordinary intelligence. Instead, he repeatedly pointed to curiosity. “I have no special talents,” he once wrote, “I am only passionately curious.” Whether or not one takes that statement literally, it reflects a consistent pattern throughout his life. He spent years asking questions that many others considered too obvious to ask. What would it feel like to ride alongside a beam of light? Why does gravity behave the way it does? What assumptions have we accepted simply because no one has challenged them?

A recent article outlining five ways Einstein changed the world reminded me that his influence extended well beyond physics. His work reshaped modern technology, from GPS systems and solar panels to lasers and semiconductors, but perhaps his greatest contribution was methodological rather than scientific. He demonstrated that breakthroughs often begin not with answers, but with unusually persistent questions.

Borrowing from psychologist Jordan A. Litman's work on epistemic curiosity, I've started thinking of these as open and closed curiosity. Closed curiosity can be defined as the desire to find a specific answer, and open curiosity, as the willingness to explore without knowing exactly where the exploration will lead. Einstein seemed to embody the latter. His thought experiments weren’t attempts to confirm what he already believed, but rather invitations to follow an idea wherever it led, even if it overturned the prevailing assumptions of the day.

It’s easy to become curious only when curiosity feels productive, when it serves a project, solves a problem, or moves us closer to a goal. Open curiosity asks something different of us. It invites us to wander intellectually, to read outside our field, ask naïve questions, follow unexpected threads, and occasionally pursue ideas that may never become useful in any obvious way.

Many of the most interesting discoveries, careers, friendships, and creative projects begin that way. Not with certainty, but with the willingness to remain interested a little longer than everyone else.

Morsel of Inspiration

“Most of us live in a world where more and more places and things are signposted, labelled, and officially “interpreted.” There is something about all this that is turning the reality of things into virtual reality. It is the reason why walking, cycling and swimming will always be subversive activities. They allow us to regain a sense of what is old and wild… by getting off the beaten track and breaking free of the official version of things… [to access] that part of our world which, like darkness, mist, woods or high mountains, still retains most mystery.”

— Roger Deakin

Until next time, stay wide.

On Birthdays, Time, and Taking Stock

I celebrated a birthday a few weeks ago, and as often happens around birthdays, I found myself thinking less about age and more about time.

The older I get, the less I experience birthdays as celebrations and the more I experience them as instruments. Not instruments for measuring age, but instruments for measuring attention, direction.

A birthday has a way of revealing where our lives have been accumulating. It draws our attention to friendships that have quietly crossed a decade, projects that once felt impossibly distant and now sit in the rearview mirror, and habits that seemed insignificant when they began but have slowly become the architecture of everyday life. The calendar advances every day, of course, but birthdays interrupt that continuity. They invite us to step outside the flow of ordinary life and briefly consider the shape of a life in progress.

The historian Stephen Kern observed that every culture develops its own relationship with time. What strikes me about birthdays is that they remain one of the few rituals that ask us to locate ourselves within time rather than simply move through it. For most of the year, we experience life at ground level. We are focused on the next meeting, the next trip, the next deadline, the next obligation. Birthdays create a small elevation. From that vantage point, it becomes easier to see patterns that are otherwise difficult to notice while we are living inside them.

The celebration of birthdays itself is a relatively recent phenomenon. Historians note that for much of human history, birthdays were largely reserved for rulers, religious figures, and the wealthy (Britannica). The idea that every individual life deserved an annual moment of recognition emerged much later and reflects a surprisingly democratic notion: that ordinary lives are worth marking and remembering.

Around birthdays, there is often an undercurrent of evaluation. We ask ourselves whether we are where we thought we would be by now. Have we accomplished enough? Built enough? Become enough? Yet the older I get, the less useful those questions seem. Life rarely unfolds according to the timelines we imagined in our twenties, and many of the things that ultimately matter most resist measurement altogether.

What I find myself paying attention to instead is where my attention has actually gone. Birthdays are useful instruments because they reveal this more honestly than we might like. The projects, relationships, communities, and interests that receive our attention inevitably grow. The ones that do not slowly recede. Looking back over a year, it becomes easier to see the difference between what we claim to value and what we have consistently made room for.

This realization feels especially relevant in a culture obsessed with optimization. We are encouraged to track our productivity, our finances, our fitness, and our milestones. Much less attention is paid to the quieter question of whether we are directing our attention toward the right things in the first place. A year can be incredibly successful by conventional measures and still leave us feeling strangely disconnected from ourselves.

Researchers studying what they call the “fresh start effect” (Milkman, Dai & Riis) have found that temporal landmarks such as birthdays, anniversaries, and the beginning of a new year often increase our motivation to make changes because they create psychological distance between our past and present selves. A birthday, in other words, helps us turn the page. It allows us to see the person we have been and the person we might yet become as distinct from one another.

Perhaps that is why birthdays continue to matter even for people who insist they do not care about them. They provide one of the few socially sanctioned opportunities to step outside the rush of ordinary life and consider the direction of our lives. We do not know how many birthdays remain ahead of us, but each one offers a chance to ask whether the way we are spending our days still reflects the way we hope to spend our years.

This Month’s Nudge: Redefine Play

This past weekend, after a recent hike, overlooking a stunning mountain (see above), I found myself in a conversation about how much our definitions of things constrain our ability to experience them.

Play came up as an example. Some people believe they are “bad” at play, or that they are innately not playful people, when perhaps the problem is not their capacity for play but the way play has been defined for them, for all of us. If play means team sports, board games, improv exercises, or large group activities, then many people will understandably conclude that play is not for them.

As a confirmed extrovert but only child, I find play can occupy diverse spaces when we define it more broadly. Sometimes play is deeply social: a game, a shared joke, a dinner party that stops feeling like a dinner party and becomes its own small ecosystem. But sometimes play is solitary and inward-facing. Drawing can be play. Dancing in the kitchen in the morning can be play. Kitesurfing can be play. Prayer, in certain moments, can carry the same quality of absorption, freedom, and surrender. Learning a new hobby can be play precisely because it returns us to the beginner’s mind, where embarrassment and discovery live very close together.

Researchers who study play often describe it less as a specific activity and more as a state of mind: voluntary, absorbing, intrinsically motivated, and enjoyable for its own sake. The National Institute for Play, founded by Stuart Brown, frames play as biologically significant across the lifespan, not merely a childhood activity. Much adult play research also suggests that playfulness is associated with well-being, creativity, emotional flexibility, and social connection.

That distinction matters because it means play is not limited to what looks playful from the outside. A person quietly painting alone may be in a more authentic state of play than someone reluctantly attending a game night. A runner on an empty road, a beginner taking a ceramics class, a person learning guitar badly and joyfully, or someone dancing barefoot in their kitchen may all be participating in the same underlying experience: self-directed engagement without the tyranny of usefulness.

This is where learning becomes such an interesting portal into play. As adults, we often approach hobbies with the grim seriousness of improvement. We want to be good quickly. We want the class to “count.” We want proof that the time was productive. But a hobby is one of the few remaining socially acceptable spaces where we are allowed to be bad at something without consequence. That is part of its value. It lets us practice curiosity without competence, effort without performance, and repetition without immediate reward.

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s work on flow is useful here. Flow describes a state of deep absorption in which people become fully involved in an activity, often losing track of time. Research on common flow activities finds that they can include solitary pursuits such as reading, creative work, sports, and other hobbies. In other words, some of the most restorative forms of play may not look social at all. They may look like a person alone, fully absorbed in something that makes them feel more alive.

Of course, play also has a powerful social function. Through games, sports, music, shared rituals, and collective activities, people learn cooperation, negotiation, trust, and repair. One useful way to understand play is as cooperation disguised as fun. This is especially visible in organized sports or group activities, where people practice rules, rivalry, disappointment, celebration, and interdependence in a contained environment.

Research on intergroup contact supports this. A 2021 study on Israeli and Palestinian children found that cooperative video gaming increased intergroup tolerance in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The broader contact hypothesis also suggests that meaningful interaction across groups can reduce prejudice, especially when people share goals and cooperate under supportive conditions. Play does not erase conflict, but it can create a temporary space in which people encounter one another as participants rather than categories.

This is also why I think about play whenever conversations about remote work come up. Digital tools create extraordinary access. They let us collaborate across distance, maintain relationships, and work with people we might never otherwise meet. But access is not the same as alchemy. Some kinds of trust seem to form through shared experience, through the side conversation, the walk after the meeting, the ridiculous moment no one planned, the laughter that comes from being in the same room when something goes slightly sideways.

For most of my adult life, I have been interested in how people connect, first personally, and then professionally through dinners, gatherings, salons, concerts, founder communities, and social spaces. The relationships that endure rarely emerge from efficiency alone. They emerge when people are given enough structure to feel safe and enough freedom to become a little less managed. In that sense, play creates optimal conditions for friendship. It reinforces the mechanisms that make people generous, curious, and open, while limiting the mechanisms that make them guarded, transactional, or performative.

So this month’s nudge is to reconsider what play might mean for you.

It does not have to be loud. It does not have to be social. It does not have to look charming on Instagram. It might be joining a recreational sports league, but it might also be taking a drawing class, learning to surf, trying ceramics, praying with more presence, cooking something impractical, dancing alone in the morning, or picking up an instrument with no ambition beyond the pleasure of making sound.

The point is not to become a more playful person as a form of self-improvement. That would defeat the purpose. The point is to notice where in your life you still allow yourself to participate without needing to perform, produce, or prove anything.

Creative Curiosities: Why We Keep Returning to Trees

This year, I have begun pressing flowers and experimenting with cyanotype printing using leaves and algae. What started as a creative exercise has had an unexpected side effect: it has made me pay closer attention to trees and plants.

Not in the abstract, but in the way attention changes once you begin looking closely at something. I have found myself noticing the structure of leaves, the shape of branches, the way different trees occupy space, and the remarkable variety hidden inside a category as seemingly simple as “tree.” The more attention I have paid, the more I have realized how often trees appear throughout human life.

They appear in religious traditions, mythologies, literature, paintings, family histories, and national symbols. We use them as conceptual frameworks, organizing knowledge through branching diagrams and describing ancestry through family trees. Some of our most enduring stories, from the Tree of Knowledge to Yggdrasil to the Bodhi Tree, place trees at the center of human understanding. They occupy a curious place in our imagination, serving simultaneously as biological organisms, metaphors, and symbols.

Part of this fascination may lie in our evolutionary history. Environmental psychologists have long been intrigued by a phenomenon known as the Savanna Hypothesis, first proposed by Gordon Orians. The theory suggests that humans retain preferences for landscapes that resemble the environments in which our species evolved: open grasslands punctuated by scattered trees, with broad sightlines, access to water, and places of refuge.

What makes the hypothesis compelling is not simply the idea that humans like nature, but rather that we do not appear to be equally drawn to all natural environments. Across many studies, people consistently favor landscapes that offer a balance of prospect and refuge, places where we can see without being entirely exposed, where exploration and safety coexist. The classic savanna provided exactly those conditions. It offered visibility, making it easier to identify threats and opportunities, while scattered trees provided shade, shelter, and resources.

Whether the hypothesis fully explains our attraction to trees remains a matter of debate. I find that idea surprisingly resonant beyond environmental psychology. Much of life seems to involve seeking the same balance: we want enough certainty to feel secure and enough possibility to remain curious, we want roots and freedom, familiarity and discovery. Perhaps part of what makes trees so enduringly appealing is that they sit at the center of that tension; they anchor a landscape while simultaneously inviting us deeper into it.

There is also growing evidence that natural environments affect us in measurable ways. Researchers Rachel and Stephen Kaplan developed what is known as Attention Restoration Theory, which proposes that nature engages our attention gently enough to allow cognitive resources depleted by modern life to recover. They called this experience “soft fascination.” Unlike email, traffic, notifications, or deadlines, nature captures attention without demanding it. It holds our focus lightly rather than forcefully, creating the conditions for reflection and recovery.

I suspect this is part of what draws us to trees specifically. They invite a different relationship with time.

Many of the oldest living trees on Earth have witnessed centuries of human history. Some bristlecone pines in the American West are approaching 5,000 years old. Entire civilizations have risen and fallen during the lifespan of a single tree.

Standing beneath an old tree often produces a feeling that is difficult to articulate. It is not quite awe and not quite humility, though it contains elements of both. Trees remind us that growth is often invisible while it is happening. They remind us that longevity rarely appears dramatic from day to day. They remind us that strength and flexibility are not opposing qualities but complementary ones.

Perhaps this is why humans continue returning to trees in our stories, our art, and our rituals. Trees offer a perspective that is increasingly difficult to find elsewhere. They place our concerns within a larger frame and remind us that growth, whether personal or collective, is often imperceptible while it is occurring. They encourage us to think not only about what we are building, but about what might endure.

Hermann Hesse, who wrote beautifully about trees throughout his life, described them as beings with “long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours.” I have found myself returning to that observation lately. There is something reassuring about the idea that wisdom might look less like speed and certainty and more like patience, rootedness, and attention.

As I was thinking about what to write for this month’s newsletter, it occurred to me that birthdays, play, and trees all share a subtle commonality: each creates a temporary shift in perspective. Perhaps what draws us to all three is that they interrupt the momentum of ordinary life, reminding us that there are larger timescales than the ones that usually dominate our attention.

The older I get, the more I suspect that attention is one of our most important forms of stewardship. We become shaped by what we repeatedly notice, what we choose to care about, and what we return to again and again. Trees have endured in our myths, religions, literature, and art not simply because they are beautiful, but because they remind us of something we are constantly in danger of forgetting: that some of the most meaningful things in life cannot be rushed and are best understood over long stretches of time.

Morsel of Inspiration

“An evening in the Aegean includes sorrow and joy in such equal measures, that nothing is left but the truth.”

— Odysseas Elytis

Until next time, stay wide.

Boredom tends to be interpreted as a signal, and usually not a positive one. It’s read as misalignment, as a sign that something isn’t working, isn’t stimulating enough, or isn’t worth continuing. That interpretation makes sense if boredom is understood as the absence of something better; it becomes less convincing when boredom shows up inside things that are, by most reasonable standards, working.

What’s more uncomfortable is that boredom often appears not when nothing is happening, but when something is repeating: work that matters but no longer feels novel, routines that are stabilizing but predictable, commitments that are directionally right, even if they don’t feel particularly alive on a random day.

“Boredom is the Price We Pay for Meaning” (The Atlantic) makes this argument directly. The framing is: the conditions that produce meaning are repetitive by design, because they require sustained attention over time, often without immediate reinforcement. There are long stretches where nothing particularly notable happens, and yet those stretches are not incidental. They are where meaning accumulates. What feels like monotony in the moment is, in many cases, the mechanism for how meaning is built. This author, faced with boredom, argues that “The only true way to endure boredom—like anger, despair, shame—is to move toward it. To listen to it. To try to understand it.” Boredom needn’t be destructive if we allow its discomfort, its anguish, to move us, to inspire us, to change us.

“Everything that displays a pattern is pregnant with boredom,” Brodsky told those flabbergasted undergrads. Of course, much of what displays a pattern—lifelong friendships, enduring marriages, serious scholarship, the making of art, prayer, Sunday mornings in winter—is also pregnant with meaning. Boredom is the price we pay for a life rich with meaning. Recognizing this makes the feeling more endurable.” (The Atlantic)

This earlier description of how boredom evolves aligns with research on hedonic adaptation, which shows that the brain systematically reduces its response to repeated stimuli over time (Brickman & Campbell, 1971). Even experiences that are deeply meaningful become less intense moment to moment. The fading of stimulation is not evidence that something matters less, but a feature of how perception works.

That becomes more consequential when placed against how modern systems are designed. This episode of The Intelligence explores how thoroughly we’ve compressed friction and shortened feedback loops. Waiting has been minimized, variation is constant, and responsiveness is expected. The effect is not just convenience, but an overall recalibration of how we do just about everything. When everything moves quickly, anything that doesn’t begins to feel like a problem, and stability starts to register as stagnation.

Research on attention supports this shift. Increased exposure to high-frequency stimuli reduces tolerance for slower, less variable tasks, making them feel disproportionately effortful (Rosen et al., 2013). In other words, the environment doesn’t just offer more stimulation. It changes the baseline for what feels engaging.

I’m left musing that if boredom is interpreted as misalignment, the natural response is to leave the situation in which one is bored. But if boredom is, in some cases, a transition between novelty and depth, then leaving interrupts the very process that produces clarity and enhanced experience in the first place.

The problem is that those two states feel similar in real time. Both lack stimulation. Both can feel flat. But one indicates that something is wrong, and the other indicates that something is becoming substantive, better. We just have to be patient enough to let boredom simmer and recalibrate.

Listenin’ & Readin’

Because sometimes a good paragraph hits harder than a green juice.

📰 The Cut — “On the Fence About Having Kids? Read This Book.”
Read here

The question of whether to have children is almost a proxy for something harder, which is how to make the type of decision where both paths lead to lives that are complete, but incompatible. At the center of this resurgence is The Baby Decision, originally published in 1981, described as “a thinking person’s self-help book” that pairs existential musings on choice and regret with workbook-style exercises. That combination is what has brought it back into the cultural fold now, a generation later. It doesn’t try to persuade you in one direction or another, but most powerfully, it fights the urge to pretend that this type of decision can be solved through logic alone.

Instead, it shifts the process into something more experiential, asking you to inhabit both futures in detail rather than evaluate them in the abstract, from a distance. What does a normal day look like? How does your relationship evolve over time? What version of yourself emerges in each path? How do your values change or manifest differently in each scenario? Once you do that, the decision inevitably changes shape. It stops being something you can think your way out of and becomes something you have to feel your way through.

What emerges clearly is that the tradeoffs are not subtle. That’s the part most conversations avoid, the idea that every meaningful choice carries loss, even if you choose it very consciously. Nobody gets everything in life, and this book is an invitation to inhabit that reality more maturely, more honestly, and in some ways, more gently.

That insight extends well beyond this question; it’s the structure of most decisions that actually matter. The difficulty isn’t identifying the “correct” answer, but choosing without ever having full certainty and being willing to live with what that choice necessarily excludes.

📰 The New Yorker — “Signed, Sealed, Delivered”
Read here

At first glance, this reads like a charming collection of stories about messages in bottles. And it is, technically, that, but only on the surface. What this article is really tracing is something much more fundamental: the human impulse to send a message without knowing if it will ever land, and the strange optimism embedded in that act. A message in a bottle is, by definition, inefficient, improbable, and often futile. Most are never found. Of those that are, many are unread, or unreadable, or meaningless. And yet, people keep throwing them into the ocean.

The throughline that makes this both a weighty and whimsical read is this tension between randomness and intention. Those of us who spend a lot of time in the ocean, know it to be chaotic, indifferent, and destructive, and yet it turns out some people behave as if it might just deliver a message exactly where it needs to go. In some ways, there’s a belief running underneath the entire practice that connection—even highly improbable connection—is worth attempting. As the article puts it, the impulse is “deep… fundamental… core to being human.”

This article doesn’t romanticize the outcome. In one of the central scenes, after miles of searching, a bottle is finally found, opened with care, and… the message is largely illegible. The connection happens, technically, but the meaning doesn’t survive the journey. And still, the reader is left with the sense that is may still matter, that the act itself carries weight independent of whether it resolves cleanly.

Read this way, it stops being about bottles and starts being about communication more broadly. Most of what we send out into the world, conversations, writing, gestures, never lands exactly as intended. Much of it disappears. Some of it is misread. Occasionally, something arrives perfectly. The ratio is not particularly encouraging, but the behavior, the attempt, and the hope persists anyway. And maybe that’s the point.

🎥 The New York Times — “How Ben Sasse is Living Now That He’s Dying”
Read here

What’s striking here is not that this video and interview are about death, but about what seems to matter once you’re in such close proximity to it. The fact that it’s a conversation with a former U.S. senator fades quickly, and what remains is a very direct confrontation with finitude, stripped of most of the usual abstractions.

The core idea is deceptively simple: time is finite, and we behave as if it isn’t. But what gives it force is how concretely Sasse navigates the conversation. Not in big, existential failures or attempts, but in how small, daily attention is spent. What you check, what you scroll, what you delay, what you half-engage with. The piece doesn’t accuse, it just lays out the mismatch most of us tolerate: the things people say matter and the things they actually give time to are often grossly misaligned.

There’s also something else running underneath it, which is harder to name but more interesting. It resists the idea that clarity arrives cleanly at the end. There’s no neat resolution, no “and therefore live like this.” Instead, it exposes how persistent the gap is, even when you are fully aware of it. Knowing time is limited doesn’t automatically translate into living differently, but it opens doors for us to explore, walk through, question.

📰 The Atlantic — “The Messiness of Friendship”
Read here

We know friendship is messy, which is obvious once stated and any of us longterm friendships know to be true. What we are much less likely to admit is how unusually low our tolerance is for that messiness, compared to other relationships. We accept misalignment, repair, and unevenness in romantic relationships as part of the process, but expect friendship to feel easy, natural, and low-friction.

What follows from that expectation is more interesting than the premise itself. The moment a friendship becomes effortful, ambiguous, or slightly off, it begins to feel like something is wrong rather than something that is deepening. The threshold for exit is lower.

Read alongside everything else I’m musing about in the newsletter this month, this is another version of the same pattern: mistaking the absence of ease for the absence of value.

This Month’s Nudge: Unjudge Someone

The Human Library is built on a simple premise: instead of borrowing a book, you borrow a person.

The individuals you “check out” are typically people whose identities or life experiences are often reduced to a category or stereotype, and the format is intentionally structured as a one-on-one conversation. The interaction is direct, bounded, and oriented around curiosity rather than performance. There is no audience, no debate, and no incentive to persuade, just a conversation that would not otherwise happen.

There is a strong research foundation for why this works. Gordon Allport’s contact hypothesis (1954) proposed that under specific conditions, direct interaction between groups reduces prejudice. Those conditions include equal status, shared context, and meaningful engagement. A large meta-analysis by Pettigrew and Tropp (2006), covering over 500 studies, found consistent support for this effect, particularly when interactions move beyond superficial exposure into actual dialogue. More recent research in social psychology also suggests that perspective-taking, when grounded in real interaction rather than abstract imagination, leads to more durable reductions in bias (Galinsky et al., 2005).

What the Human Library does is operationalize these conditions in a controlled environment. It removes the usual barriers that prevent meaningful interaction and replaces them with a structure that makes curiosity the default. It creates easier onramps for the kind of conversation we would not necessarily choose on our own.

So this month’s nudge is to unjudge someone. Treat this as a practical application and look for where your understanding of someone is based on abstraction rather than interaction. Most assumptions remain intact not because they are accurate, but because they are never tested. In May, I invite us to test them. Pick a person or persons you’ve already jumped to conclusions about and ssk a real question you don’t already think you know the answer to. Stay in the conversation longer than is comfortable. Notice where your instinct is to retreat back to the category, and resist it. Focus on learning more about their experience, their perspective, their beliefs.

The goal isn’t agreement; it’s the specificity that comes from engaging with a individual instead of a category.

Creative Curiosities: Photography, Power, and the Editing of Reality

We tend to treat photographs as evidence. A photograph feels definitive because it presents itself as a record, something fixed and observable, something that can be pointed to as proof. But every image is the result of a series of decisions long before it ever reaches the viewer: where the photographer stands, what they choose to include, what they leave out, when they decide the moment is worth capturing. Even in documentary photography, what you are seeing is not reality itself, but a version of it shaped by perspective.

What makes this particularly effective is how little resistance this encounters because photographs generally carry an implicit authority. They bypass a layer of skepticism that text often invites. If something is written, it can be argued with; if something is seen, it is more likely to be accepted. That’s what makes photography such a powerful tool of narrative control, not because it lies outright, but because it presents a version of reality that feels complete. Until now, again, in the age of Artificial Intelligence.

That becomes more difficult to dismiss when you look at how photography has been used historically, not just to document events, but to construct them. As a particularly compelling example, in Soviet Russia, images were not treated as neutral records, but rather actively manipulated to align with the political narrative of the moment. Individuals who had fallen out of favor were systematically removed from photographs, often with such precision that the edits were nearly invisible. Abundant fields and healthy farmhands were photographed to portray abundance during times of famine. And just as importantly, workers themselves were staged and idealized—muscular, focused, and tireless—forming the visual language of Socialist Realism, where labor wasn’t just documented but mythologized. Factories appeared efficient, bodies appeared strong, and the act of work itself was transformed into something aspirational, regardless of actual conditions. The goal was not simply to alter an image, but to alter the record of reality itself.

One of the most well-known examples is Nikolai Yezhov, a high-ranking official during Stalin’s regime who was later executed during the Great Purge. In the original photograph, he stands beside Stalin along the Moscow Canal. In the revised version, he is gone. The composition remains intact. Stalin remains exactly where he was. The water fills the space where Yezhov once stood. The image looks clean, coherent, and unquestionable. Only the person has disappeared.

What’s easy to miss is that this didn’t begin as pure manipulation. It emerged out of something far more experimental. In The Soviet Photograph, 1924–1937, Margarita Tupitsyn challenges the idea that the Soviet avant-garde simply collapsed under political pressure. Instead, she argues that photography during this period represented one of the last major attempts to figure out how art, politics, and mass communication could actually converge. Techniques like photomontage weren’t initially about deception, but about reach. Artists like Rodchenko, Lissitzky, and Klutsis were experimenting with how images could carry ideas at scale, how visual language could mobilize, persuade, and unify.

That experimentation didn’t disappear. It was absorbed.

As Tupitsyn traces, those same tools were gradually redirected to serve the needs of the state. Photomontage became less about exploration and more about control. Images were tied directly to political milestones—the New Economic Policy, Lenin’s death, Stalin’s Five-Year Plans—and increasingly shaped by censorship and ideological constraint. The shift wasn’t abrupt. It was a transition from open-ended experimentation into a closed system where the goal was no longer to discover new visual forms, but to produce a consistent and legible version of reality.

Subversion by photography, in other words.

This broader and systematic practice documented in David King’s The Commissar Vanishes and examined in detail in this New Yorker piece. What emerges from both is not just a series of altered images, but a method. Figures were removed, crowds reshaped, context erased, and then the revised images were circulated as official reality. As the article notes, the regime wasn’t simply censoring information; it was producing a version of truth in which inconvenient people and events had never existed in the first place.

What’s interesting, and erhaps pmore unsettling, is what happens after. This review in Eurasianet looks at how these same images are received now, decades later. Stripped of their original political urgency, they often read as aesthetic artifacts: beautiful compositions, striking portraits, compelling visuals. Time softens them. The propaganda doesn’t disappear, but it becomes less legible, easier to overlook, sometimes even detached from its original intent.

That shift matters. It shows how easily context can erode, and how images can be reinterpreted once the conditions that produced them are no longer visible. What was once a tool of control becomes, over time, something that can be appreciated on entirely different terms.

Which brings it back to the present. The question is no longer whether an image is real. The more relevant question is how it was constructed, what it was trying to do, and what parts of that intention are still visible. Every photograph carries a point of view, whether it is acknowledged or not. Photography doesn’t just document reality. It shapes the version of reality that we end up believing, and, over time, the version we forget to question.

Morsel of Inspiration

“You can choose courage or you can choose comfort, but you cannot choose both.”

— Brene Brown

Until next time, stay wide.

I had the opportunity to hear Vanessa Woods speak the other day (thanks Brave Space). There was something clarifying about the way she described her work, particularly the research behind Survival of the Friendliest. It challenges a story many of us have absorbed without questioning: we tend to think evolution rewards strength, dominance, and competition, that the ones who win are the ones who overpower.

Her research, alongside Brian Hare, suggests something more precise, and frankly, more useful. Across species, including humans, the individuals who are most likely to thrive are those who are more socially tolerant, more cooperative, and better able to read and respond to others. This is grounded in what researchers call self-domestication theory, which argues that over time, species can evolve through selection for prosocial traits rather than aggression. In humans, this is reflected not only behaviorally, but biologically. Compared to earlier hominins, modern humans show reduced reactive aggression, increased capacity for social learning, and morphological changes associated with lower baseline threat responses.

There are compelling cross-species examples that make this concrete. In one of the most cited experiments, foxes selectively bred for friendliness over generations not only became more sociable, but also developed physical changes, including softer facial features and more juvenile traits. The selection pressure was not strength. It was tolerance. Similarly, comparative studies between dogs and wolves show that dogs outperform wolves in tasks involving human communication, such as following pointing cues or interpreting gaze. The advantage is not intelligence in the abstract. It is cooperative cognition, the ability to work with others.

In humans, this shows up in ways that are easy to overlook because they are so embedded in daily life. Research in cultural evolution and anthropology suggests that our ability to collaborate at scale, share knowledge, and build cumulative culture is what differentiates us most sharply from other species. Even something as simple as eye contact plays a role. Humans have a uniquely visible sclera, the white part of the eye, which makes gaze direction easier to detect and supports coordination and trust. These are small design features, but they scale into systems.

The throughline is not aggression; it is the ability to connect, coordinate, and build trust. “Friendliness,” in this framing, is not a personality trait, but rather a survival strategy.

Once you sit with that, it starts to reframe how we think about risk. Most of the risks that shape our lives are not physical; they are social. Saying the honest thing when it would be easier to stay vague. Reaching out to someone you respect. Walking into a room where you do not yet feel fully placed. Letting yourself be seen before you have full control over how it will land. Asking for help. Helping. These are small decisions, but they compound in ways that are not always immediately visible.

From a rational standpoint, many of these are good bets. The upside is meaningful, and the downside is usually discomfort rather than actual loss. And yet, we hesitate. Part of that is well documented. Research in social psychology shows that humans consistently overestimate the likelihood and emotional impact of rejection, often referred to as the “liking gap,” where others tend to like us more than we assume. At the same time, work on affective forecasting shows that we are poor predictors of how future discomfort will feel and how quickly we will recover from it. Historically, this bias made sense. Social exclusion carried real survival costs. The brain has not fully updated, even if the environment has.

There is also a physiological layer here. Social connection is associated with increased oxytocin and reduced cortisol, which helps regulate stress and reinforces trust over time. In contrast, social avoidance tends to maintain or heighten threat sensitivity. The implication is straightforward. Engaging, even imperfectly, is not just socially useful. It is biologically stabilizing.

What Woods’ work offers is a kind of recalibration. If cooperation and connection are core to how we succeed over time, then avoiding social risk is not neutral. It very much works against us. It keeps us from engaging in the very behaviors that allow relationships, opportunities, and ideas to take shape. In that sense, friendliness requires a certain kind of courage. It asks for openness under uncertainty, which is simply another form of risk-taking.

This is where logic and risk start to align. It is not that logic makes you cautious. It helps you see more clearly which risks are worth taking, and why.

Read more

Spring Training for the Heart

March always tempts me toward softness. Maybe it’s the spring light, the open windows before summer comes, the post-Valentine’s settling (my least favorite holiday). And with this softness, I often find myself revisiting some favorite readings about love; love not as a mood, but as a discipline and a muscle.

He has many great interviews, but in one of my favorite conversations with Krista Tippett on On Being, Alain de Botton makes a claim that feels both unromantic and deeply relieving: the real work of love begins after the infatuation ends. We are trained for the fireworks; we are not, unfortunately, trained for the maintenance. Modern romantic culture quietly assumes that if something is hard, it must be wrong. If we have to work at it, perhaps we chose incorrectly. But this framework collapses under even modest psychological scrutiny. Long-term partnership is less about compatibility as a static trait and more about two people repeatedly negotiating disappointment, projection, and misinterpretation. Love is less about finding the right person and more about becoming someone capable of staying.

This view aligns closely with attachment research. What predicts long-term relationship satisfaction is not the absence of conflict, but the ability to repair after rupture. Secure functioning couples do not avoid friction; they metabolize it. They return, they adjust, they make meaning of it. Love, in this framing, is regulatory. It is co-created nervous system safety over time. Decades of longitudinal research by The Gottman Institute reinforce this: even for thriving couples, approximately 69% of relationship conflicts are “perpetual problems,” rooted in enduring differences rather than solvable issues. In their view, what matters is not perfection, but a consistent bias in favor of leaning toward each other in favor of repair.

And then there is Rainer Maria Rilke, be still my heart. His writing on love insists that intimacy is not fusion but the protection of separateness within connection. That love is not about dissolving into another person, but about holding one another’s interior worlds with reverence. It is one of the most precise and demanding visions of partnership I know.

“The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries; on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust. A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

There is something profoundly modern about this idea. We live in a culture that confuses closeness with access: constant texting, constant availability, constant emotional transparency, constant reassurance. But research on differentiation suggests the opposite. The strongest relationships are formed between two differentiated adults — two people who can remain psychologically intact in the presence of intimacy. Love requires closeness, and it also requires space. The paradox is structural.

When we collapse into each other, resentment grows. When we defend too fiercely, loneliness grows. The work is learning how to move between those poles without panic. Perhaps this is the true hard work de Botton gestures toward: not passion, not even compatibility, but the quiet, repetitive labor of staying curious about someone even after they have disappointed you (as they inevitably will).

To love well is to tolerate ambiguity. To accept that the other person will never fully resolve their pains — and certainly not yours. To let someone remain partially unknowable without turning that mystery into threat. This is not bleak. It is clarifying. Because love, when stripped of fantasy, is not a feeling to fall into. It is a discipline — a pattern of behaviors, actions, and skills enacted over time. And perhaps that is the quiet promise of spring: not that love us easy, but that it can grow.

Listenin’ & Readin’

Because sometimes a good paragraph hits harder than a green juice.

📚 Book — 38 Londres Street: On Impunity, Pinochet in England and a Nazi in Patagonia by Philippe Sands
Buy the book

Sands uses a single address in Santiago, once a torture site under Pinochet, as an entry point into a broader meditation on power, memory, and accountability. Moving between Chile and Europe, he traces how impunity travels across borders and generations, revealing how legal systems, political interests, and personal loyalties shape what justice looks like in practice. What makes the book so arresting is its insistence that history is not sealed off. It lingers in institutions, in families, in architecture itself. Justice, here, is less a dramatic reckoning than a slow, imperfect negotiation with the past.

📰 The New Yorker — “How Jeff Bezos Brought Down The Washington Post”
Read here

This piece examines the tension between concentrated wealth and editorial independence, using The Washington Post as a case study in how ownership structures shape culture. It is less about personality and more about incentives, governance, and the subtle ways power operates within institutions. What stands out is how erosion rarely announces itself. Trust thins gradually as priorities shift and internal norms recalibrate. The article ultimately reads as a meditation on how credibility is built, maintained, and quietly compromised.

🎧 Podcast — Acquired “The NFL”
Listen here

Inspired by watching the Super Bowl this year, this episode dissects the NFL as a masterclass in business design rather than sport. It unpacks revenue sharing, media rights, collective bargaining, and centralized branding to show how the league built one of the most powerful entertainment monopolies in the United States. The spectacle may feel spontaneous, but the infrastructure behind it is meticulous. What emerges is a reminder that culture at scale is rarely accidental. It is engineered through incentives, governance, and long-term strategic alignment.

🎧 Podcast — The Trailhead “Science Journalist Christie Aschwanden on What Actually Works in Recovery”
Listen here

As I make my way back from a series of back-to-back injuries, I have been seeking out this kind of content. In this podcast, Christie Aschwanden, former lead science writer at FiveThirtyEight and author of Good to Go, investigates the multibillion-dollar recovery industry with both scientific rigor and an elite athlete’s skepticism. She challenges the mythology around cold plunges, cryotherapy, sleep trackers, anti-inflammatories, and the so-called post-workout “window,” arguing that many popular recovery tools are either overhyped or counterproductive.

What makes the episode especially sharp is its defense of boring fundamentals. Sleep. Time. Nutrition. Paying attention to your body. Aschwanden makes a compelling case for radical acceptance and situational awareness over biohacking theater. The most effective recovery strategies, she suggests, are rarely sexy. They are steady, inexpensive, and deeply human.

This Month’s Nudge: A Notch Down

We are two months into the year. I have no idea how your resolutions are going, but the cultural script at this point is predictable: optimize, refine, track, maximize, extract more from the remaining weeks of the quarter. But what if, instead of accelerating, we closed the first quarter by taking at least some things down a notch?

Scheduled Softness. Choose one recurring time each week, even thirty minutes, that is protected for undistracted presence with someone you care about.

The Repair Window. However long it would normally take you to address a rupture, shorten it. If you tend to wait days, make it hours. If you tend to wait hours, make it minutes. Small misunderstandings calcify when left alone. Simple phrases can go a long way. “I think we missed each other earlier.” “I don’t want that to sit weird.” “Can we reset?”

One Thing Fewer. Before the end of March, remove one nonessential commitment. A set of meetings. One standing obligation. Something you reflexively say yes to. Spring is pruning season, and as my friend Miguel likes to say, growth depends as much on subtraction as on effort.

Analog Month. Step off social media, institute a phone-free day once a week, or some other version that feels relevant for you. Notice what changes in your nervous system, in your boredom tolerance, in your attention span. Much of what feels urgent is simply visible, and absence restores proportion.

Creative Curiosities

Ritual, it seems, is the quiet architecture beneath our best work, part superstition, part structure, part love letter to the future self who must return tomorrow.

I recently fell down a small rabbit hole on the rituals of famous creative women, and I am once again convinced that genius is rarely glamorous. I am showing my bias here, but it seems to be structured, sometimes oddly so.

Joan Didion began her mornings with Coca-Cola and almonds. She wrote steadily throughout the day and had a drink in the evening to get “loose enough” to edit. Toward the end of a novel, she would sleep in the same room as the manuscript. Proximity as devotion. As if the work quite literally needed to breathe the same air.

Susan Sontag often worked in 18 to 20 hour bursts, but surrounded that intensity with rules. Wake at 8 a.m. No calls in the morning. Lunch only with her editor. Read at night. She allowed herself to break two rules per week. Discipline with margins. A system that acknowledged both rigor and rebellion.

Maya Angelou woke at 5:30 a.m., had coffee with her husband, and then went to a rented hotel or motel room to write. She left if the work was going badly and stayed if it was going well. At home, she read her writing aloud and asked for no commentary. Boundaries around feedback. Boundaries around space. She understood that creative momentum is fragile.

Donna Tartt wrote for the first three hours of the morning, often at the New York Public Library. She wrote by hand and color coded revisions. If the work was flowing, she continued. If not, she stopped and did something else entirely. Intensity paired with detachment.

Elsa Schiaparelli woke at 8 a.m., had lemon juice and tea, read the paper, and walked to her studio if the weather was nice. She believed much of her designing happened in her head, while walking or driving. Movement as incubation. Thinking as physical.

What struck me is not the specifics. It is the seriousness. Each woman treated her creative life as something that required scaffolding: time blocks, physical space, ritual objects, sometimes even a little superstition. Not because ritual is magical, but because repetition reduces friction. In a culture that romanticizes inspiration, these women engineered conditions. They did not wait to feel ready; they showed up, often at the same hour, with the same drink, in the same room.

The mythology of genius softens under this lens. What remains is practice. And perhaps that is the real spell: not inspiration, but return.

Morsel of Inspiration

“Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question of what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. If one feels that there is nothing 'we' can do―but who is that 'we'?―and nothing 'they' can do either―and who are 'they'―then one starts to get bored, cynical, apathetic.”

— Susan Sontag

Until next time, stay wide.

Building a Village in Your Zip Code

When we talk about community, we often use metaphors — “village,” “backbone,” “network”— but rarely look at the evidence of how connection actually functions in people’s lives.

Social scientists describe a concept called social cohesion, the degree of connectedness, trust, and mutual support between people in a place. Higher social cohesion is linked to stronger community capacity, better collective problem-solving, and more resilience in the face of disruption.

Seems pretty obvious, but studies show a positive feedback loop between volunteering and cohesion: people who volunteer are more likely to feel connected to others, and people who feel connected are more likely to volunteer again.

Another body of research suggests that community-led initiatives can strengthen wellbeing and social networks more effectively than top-down programs because they are locally rooted, contextual, and co-created with neighbors.

What does this look like on the ground?

In Refettorio Harlem (see NYT), a nonprofit transforms surplus food into three-course sit-down meals served with dignity multiple nights per week. Volunteers and neighbors gather, not in line or at a handout window, but at a table (and we all know how I feel about those! ❤️ ), a simple structure that builds shared space, trust, and repeated interaction. Over time, this transforms food access into community infrastructure rather than episodic charity.

Consistent engagement like this, in which people participate, exchange skills, and show up for one another, is the backbone of local resilience and what researchers would call “community capacity,” the collective ability to identify challenges and act on them together.

As intuitive as all of this sounds, most of us don’t do much to engender this. My invitation to all of us in 2026 is to create some space to decenter abstract ideals and instead invest in building a village.

So, where can we start?

Pick a lane.
Choose one thing you can do quarterly, monthly, weekly, or daily without burning out. Villages are built through repetition, not intensity.

Schedule it.
Life gets in the way of good intentions, so put it on the calendar. I have a standing calendar invite to donate blood every 60 days, so I never forget. During the pandemic, I had a recurring Friday block labeled “check in on people who need it,” with a running list in the notes. Care that is scheduled is more likely to actually happen.

Make it specific for others.
“Let me know if you need anything” is generous, but it places the cognitive work on the person already in need. People are far more likely to accept help when the offer is clear and low-friction. “I’m at the pharmacy on Wednesdays” or “I make extra soup every Sunday, do you want some?” works better than open-ended well-intentioned asks.

Keep it general for yourself.
Just like New Year’s resolutions, overly narrow commitments set us up to fail. “I will do something creative every Monday” leaves room for reality, adaptation, novelty in a way that “I will draw a portrait every Monday” does not. Define the lane, not the exact output. Flexibility will keep you showing up.

Start where you are.
Most community that actually holds people together is hyper-local. Proximity lowers friction. The people you see regularly, live near, or run into by accident are the ones most likely to become a village. You don’t need to build community everywhere; you need to build it somewhere.

Choose repetition over novelty.
Novelty feels generous. Repetition builds trust. Doing the same thing again turns care from a favor into infrastructure. Predictability is what makes people feel safe enough to rely on one another.

Lower the bar.
Villages do not require excellence. Slightly messy homes, meals that are just ok, conversations that wander. Most people are not looking for polish, they are looking for continuity.

Let yourself receive.
Care cannot flow in only one direction. Receiving help is not a failure of independence; it is how the system closes the loop. Big reminder (repeats to self): villages endure when care circulates.

A village isn’t a vibe. It’s a set of small, observable, repeatable systems of care and convening that make connection quotidian rather than occasional. When connection is ordinary, wellbeing stops being something we chase privately and starts becoming something we hold collectively. Stress softens because help is expected. Loneliness loosens because presence is patterned. Resilience grows not through exceptional moments, but through the reliability of being met where life actually happens.

Read more

Cities, Evolution, and the Science of Belonging.

Brief soapbox moment: Cities do not work because they are efficient; they work because they are adaptive.

One of the ideas I keep returning to, inspired by Paul Graham’s writing on cities, is that the places we love most were rarely designed to be lovable. They became that way over time, through use, iteration, and the slow accumulation of human behavior.

Urban research supports this. Cities that thrive tend to share a few measurable traits: density without overload, mixed use neighborhoods rather than rigid zoning silos, and a high frequency of casual social interaction. These are not aesthetic preferences. They are structural conditions that support belonging.

Here is a grounding data point that stays with me. Studies in social psychology show that brief, casual interactions with strangers meaningfully increase reported wellbeing and sense of social connection. People consistently predict these interactions will be awkward or draining and are consistently wrong. Even short exchanges with baristas, neighbors, or familiar faces along a daily route improve mood and feelings of belonging.

This aligns with broader research on loneliness and social capital. Sociologist Robert Putnam has shown that declines in informal social participation, not the loss of close relationships alone, correlate strongly with lower trust, lower wellbeing, and weaker communities. Belonging erodes not when intimacy disappears, but when casual connection does.

Cities are uniquely positioned to counteract this, when they are allowed to.

Environments optimized purely for efficiency, traffic flow, economic extraction, constant motion, tend to suppress exactly these kinds of interactions. When space is designed only to move people through rather than let them linger, social trust has little opportunity to form. Belonging, it turns out, is not efficient.

This was a core insight of Jane Jacobs. Safety, creativity, and community emerge from presence, repetition, and shared stewardship. Not from top down control, but from many small interactions layered over time.

There is also a psychological mechanism at work. Research on place attachment shows that people feel more connected to environments where they experience agency, where they can shape space through routine, use, and contribution. A city becomes meaningful when it feels responsive, not pristine.

This reframes belonging entirely. Belonging is not something we earn once we fit in. It forms when systems invite participation. When people are not just consumers of space, but collaborators in it. When there are enough third places, cafes, parks, sidewalks, living rooms disguised as public space, for life to unfold without agenda.

Cities are, in this way, living experiments in coexistence. They evolve the way relationships do, through repetition, repair, and shared history. Not by being perfect, but by being permeable.

And maybe that is the quiet lesson cities keep offering us, especially now, when disconnection feels structural rather than personal. Belonging is not found in the ideal place. It is built slowly, in places that leave enough room for us to show up and shape them.

Listenin’ & Readin’

Because sometimes a good paragraph hits harder than a green juice.

🎧 Podcast: Radiolab “The Good Show”
Listen here

Radiolab asks a deceptively simple question: what actually makes something good. Not morally acceptable or socially approved, but genuinely good. The episode moves through philosophy, psychology, and human judgment, exploring how context, intention, and consequence collide. It is a reminder that our instincts around goodness are often shakier than we think, and that clarity rarely comes from certainty, but from curiosity.

🎥 Interview: Alain de Botton on “Comforting Truths About Human Nature”

One of my favorite modern-day philosophers Alain de Botton offers a gentle and softly radical reframing of how we understand ourselves and one another. Rather than aiming for idealized versions of human behavior, he invites us to accept our shared fragility, emotional inconsistency, and neediness as features, not failures. The talk is an argument for compassion rooted in realism. If we expect less moral perfection and more psychological complexity, we create room for forgiveness, patience, and more humane relationships, both personal and civic.

📚 Book: The Anxious Generation
Buy the Book

Currently shaping a lot of conversations I am having with parents and non-parents alike. In The Anxious Generation, Haidt expands on years of research to examine how a phone based childhood has altered development, risk tolerance, and resilience. The book is not anti-technology, but deeply pro-childhood. It argues for the importance of embodied play, independence, and friction in forming healthy adults. A data rich and emotionally grounded look at how protection, when taken too far, can quietly become harm.

📰 Article: The New Yorker “Russell Vought and the Return of Hard Power”
Read here

This profile of Russell Vought from a couple of months ago has rally stayed with me. It offers a clear eyed look at the ideological infrastructure behind this second Trump administration. Rather than focusing on personality, the piece examines power, governance, and the long game of institutional influence. It is a study in how ideas move from the margins to the center, and how conviction paired with strategy can reshape the state itself. A useful read for understanding how belief systems translate into policy, often quietly, often patiently.

This Month’s Nudge: Let Activities Do the Social Work

As adults, we tend to look for friendship in the same ways we look for romance or networking. Conversation first. Chemistry first. Compatibility upfront. And when it feels effortful or awkward, we quietly assume something is wrong with us.

But friendship in adulthood often forms differently.

Research on adult social connection suggests that repeated shared activity is one of the most reliable paths to closeness. Not deep disclosure. Not instant alignment. Simply showing up to the same place, doing the same thing, over time. The bond grows because the structure carries the weight.

This is why activities matter more than we give them credit for.

Classes, clubs, volunteer projects, running routes, choirs, climbing gyms, language groups, community dinners. These are not hobbies in the casual sense. They are social infrastructure. They lower the activation energy of friendship by giving people a shared reason to return.

Activities create a reset. Who you are outside does not dominate who you are inside. Titles, success, messiness, and social narratives recede. The nervous system registers safety because the expectations are clear. You know what you are there to do. Everything else is optional.

There is also something quietly powerful about moving toward something together. Humans bond more easily when they are oriented toward a shared goal, not toward each other directly. When attention is placed on the task, connection becomes a byproduct rather than a performance.

This matters because adult life offers fewer default containers for friendship. School, sports teams, dorms, and early career environments did a lot of work for us. As those structures fall away, many of us expect friendship to appear without replacing the container that once made it possible.

The invitation here is to be more intentional about the kinds of activities you choose. Not based on productivity or optimization, but based on their social physics. Does this environment invite repetition. Does it allow people to be human without explanation. Does it make it easy to return.

Friendship does not require intensity. It requires proximity, rhythm, and time.

So rather than asking who you want to be friends with, it may be more useful to ask where you are willing to show up consistently. Often, the relationships follow.

Creative Curiosities

Cooking as Inquiry, Continuity, Experiment

With a wave of new subscribers joining us this month, I wanted to keep this Creative Curiosities section from last time around. It was a favorite, and still very much worth sharing.

Some cookbooks don’t really teach you how to cook; they teach you how to play.

I find myself returning, again and again, to books that treat food not as an outcome to perfect, but as a medium for inquiry into appetite, memory, migration, and pleasure. They resist the idea that cooking is something to “get right” and instead invite a posture of curiosity: try, taste, adjust, run a little wild.

M.F.K. Fisher was the first to show me this. Her writing (see here and here) is less about recipes than about hunger itself, physical and otherwise. She writes about eating as a way of understanding longing, constraint, companionship, and joy. In Fisher’s world, cooking becomes a means of making sense of life as it is, not as it’s supposed to be.

On a different note, Tamar Adler’s An Everlasting Meal carries that sensibility forward through continuity and reuse. One meal becomes the next. Leftovers are not an afterthought but a starting point. The creativity lies in noticing what remains and asking what else it could become. Cooking, here, is not a series of fresh starts, but rather a long, forgiving conversation with time.

That same spirit shows up in many of the cookbooks I love most:

• Gjelina reads like a study in restraint and iteration. Nothing is rushed. Nothing is showy. The confidence comes from attention, not spectacle.

• Yotam Ottolenghi’s work — I think I own almost all of his cookbooks (there are many), but my initiation was with Jerusalem, which is a stunning book that treats cooking as a dialogue between cultures, geographies, and memories. His recipes feel expansive, generous without being rigid. Especially because some of the ingredients are difficult to find, they reward intuition much more than precision.

• Another favorite is The Immigrant Cookbook: Recipes that Make America Great. Here, food is a record, an adaptation, an inheritance in motion. Recipes become stories of arrival, translation, and reinvention. I can attest that this living archive is as varied as it is delicious.

• Because I grew up in Mexico, I have a soft spot for Alex Stupak’s Tacos: Recipes and Provocations, because it is indeed provocative. Technique matters, sure, but so does questioning what’s essential and what can be reimagined.

• And then there are quieter books like Yvette van Boven’s Home Made (she has a whole series, including a Christmas version), which celebrate the everyday ingenuity of cooking without overthinking it. It feels like a summer in the French countryside: practical, playful, and observant.

What all of these books share is a refusal of performance. They don’t promise mastery, they offer practice through play, i.e. learning through repetition, feedback, and low-stakes mistakes.

This month, I invite us to think about our kitchens as studios. Not places of optimization, but rather of curiosity, creativity, heat, and playfulness.

Morsel of Inspiration

“The soul comes from a place of flame, and the flame is restless.
Its purpose is to rise.”

— Book of Splendor, The Zohar

Until next time, stay wide.

The Sea is not relaxing you, it’s regulating you.

On the heels of last month’s comment about the “aquatic awe effect” (read here), I wanted to dive a little deeper (pun fully intended) into the topic, in part motivated by an Isak Dinesen quote I love, “"The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears, or the sea.”

We often talk about the ocean as if it were a balm — a place of calm, softness, retreat. But anyone who has truly entered the sea knows that relaxation is only part of the story. The ocean wakes us up as much as it settles us. It demands attention, coordination, breath. It is as much a place of adventure as it is of rest.

That tension — between calm and challenge — is precisely why it works.

What many people feel after time in the ocean isn’t just relaxation. It’s regulation. A steadier nervous system. A clearer internal rhythm. A sense of being returned to oneself rather than removed from the world.

Cold water immersion has been shown to activate the parasympathetic nervous system via the vagus nerve, increasing heart-rate variability (HRV), a well-established marker of stress resilience and longevity. It seems that even brief exposure to cold or open water can shift the body away from chronic sympathetic “fight-or-flight” and toward a state that is calm, alert, and adaptive. What we experience as groundedness is, physiologically, improved autonomic balance.

Stress hormones follow a similar pattern. Multiple studies have shown that cold exposure and immersion in natural blue spaces are associated with reductions in cortisol alongside increases in endorphins and norepinephrine (Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports). This biochemical combination helps explain why people often leave the water feeling both soothed and energized. Not dulled, but sharpened.

The ocean also introduces a form of stress that is beneficial rather than depleting. Waves require coordination. Cold requires breath control. Unpredictability requires presence. This aligns with research on “eustress,” or positive stress, in which manageable challenge improves emotional regulation rather than overwhelming it. The sea engages us just enough to quiet rumination by giving the nervous system something real to organize around.

Even the air matters. Coastal environments contain higher concentrations of negatively charged air ions, especially during strong wave activity or storms. While the effects are modest, meta-analyses suggest these ions are associated with short-term improvements in mood, likely mediated through serotonin pathways) It may help explain why stormy days by the sea feel clarifying rather than peaceful, invigorating rather than sedative.

Then there is immersion itself. Water applies uniform hydrostatic pressure across the body, reducing joint load and modulating pain through well-documented pain-gating mechanisms in the nervous system. This is why aquatic therapy is widely used for arthritis and chronic pain, with consistent reductions in pain and stiffness reported across studies. The relief is not only thermal, it is neurological.

Ultimately, although claims about absorbing minerals through the skin are often overstated, but something important still happens at the sensory level. Full-body immersion delivers coherent, rhythmic input — pressure, temperature, movement, breath — which does interrupt stress-driven mental loops. Neuroscientists increasingly understand this as a shift from top-down cognitive control to bottom-up sensory regulation.

So when we say the ocean relaxes us, we’re not wrong, but we are incomplete. The sea restores us not by coddling the nervous system, but by teaching it how to meet uncertainty without panic. How to feel challenged without feeling unsafe.

The sea does not distract us into calm, it regulates us into coherence. It doesn’t just make us calm; it makes us capable.

Listenin’ & Readin’

Because sometimes a good paragraph hits harder than a green juice.

🎧 Podcast: On Being with Alain de Botton — “The True Hard Work of Love and Relationships”
Listen/Read here
Philosopher Alain de Botton offers a disarmingly honest exploration of love, not as a feeling but as a discipline. He speaks with Krista Tippett about how romantic ideals often sabotage real intimacy, and how the ordinary work of patience, forgiveness, and curiosity is what makes love enduring. It is a conversation about maturity in an age that confuses desire with devotion, and about how growth often begins the moment the fantasy ends.

🎧 Podcast: The Ezra Klein Show — “Why Adults Lose the Beginner’s Mind”
Listen on Spotify
Ezra Klein talks with psychologist and author Alison Gopnik about why children learn so fluidly and why adults often lose that open, experimental curiosity. They explore the neuroscience of learning, the value of wonder, and how age shifts our attention from exploration to efficiency. The conversation invites a simple but radical question: how might we recover the beginner’s mind without giving up the wisdom of experience?

🎧 Podcast: Radiolab — “What Up Holmes?”
Listen on Spotify

Love it or hate it, the freedom to say obnoxious, dissenting, and even subversive things is part of what defines America. But our near-absolute approach to free speech is surprisingly recent and can be traced to a single figure: Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. During one pivotal eight-month period, Holmes made a dramatic reversal in his view of what should be sayable, and that turn of mind reshaped American law. Radiolab unpacks how and why he changed, weaving a story of anarchists, friendship, and moral awakening. It is a meditation on courage, conscience, and how one mind can change the course of a nation.

🎧📚 Jerry Colonna — Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up
Reboot Podcast | Buy the Book
Recommended by my cofounder and well worth the listen or the read. Colonna, a former venture capitalist turned executive coach, writes and speaks about leadership as an act of self-discovery. Through radical self-inquiry, he challenges the myth that growth requires armor. Instead, he offers a more disarming truth: the best leaders are the ones willing to be seen. Reboot is part guide, part mirror, a work that invites us to meet our work and ourselves with more honesty and less fear.

📚 Book: Breakneck — Dan Wang
Buy the Book
Currently on my nightstand. In Breakneck, Wang chronicles the paradoxes of modern China’s innovation economy: the speed of development, the human cost of ambition, and the tension between technological progress and moral purpose. It is part travelogue, part economic meditation, part cultural mirror, a sharp lens on what it means to build, scale, and live in an era moving faster than comprehension.

This Month’s Nudge

As the year winds down, there’s a strong pull to summarize it cleanly. Wins, lessons, gratitude, growth. We smooth the edges. We narrate coherence where there was mostly improvisation.

Before setting intentions, before naming goals, before deciding what’s “next,” try sitting with the year that actually happened, not the version that looks good from the outside, but the one you lived from the inside.

A true retrospective isn’t about self-optimization; it’s about pattern recognition. About noticing where your energy went without asking whether it should have. About seeing what held, and what only appeared to.

Instead of asking what you accomplished this year, try asking yourself questions that don’t rush you toward answers:

• What does your day fall apart without?

• What part of your life looks convincing from the outside but feels staged on the inside?

• Which of your habits are actually grief or fear, masked as something else?

• What part of your life do you rush through, ignore, avoid because staying there would require feeling something uncomfortable?

Then zoom out further.

• How many days like today are you willing to live?

• What do you want to change but haven’t been able to?

• What were you ashamed of this year? What scared you?

• What do you reach for first when you’re alone, and what might be underneath that impulse?

• Whom do you think of first when you have a big win or joy to share, and do they know that?

• What are you grateful for that you haven’t expressed? Who or what should you thank explicitly?

• What would immediately collapse if you stopped holding it together?

And finally, the questions that tend to linger:

• If the version of you at eighty could spend a single afternoon inside your current life, what would you hope they’d find you in the middle of?

• If nothing changed for the next five years, would you feel relieved or alarmed?

• What was the most difficult lesson from this year? The most painful loss? The hardest regret?

You don’t need to answer all of these. You don’t need to write anything down. You don’t need to turn insight into action.

The nudge is simply to notice what keeps repeating. What shows up there is rarely convenient, but it’s almost always honest. And honesty, especially at the edge of a year, is its own quiet form of courage.

Creative Curiosities

Cooking as Inquiry, Continuity, Experiment

Some cookbooks don’t really teach you how to cook; they teach you how to play.

I find myself returning, again and again, to books that treat food not as an outcome to perfect, but as a medium for inquiry into appetite, memory, migration, and pleasure. They resist the idea that cooking is something to “get right” and instead invite a posture of curiosity: try, taste, adjust, run a little wild.

M.F.K. Fisher was the first to show me this. Her writing (see here and here) is less about recipes than about hunger itself, physical and otherwise. She writes about eating as a way of understanding longing, constraint, companionship, and joy. In Fisher’s world, cooking becomes a means of making sense of life as it is, not as it’s supposed to be.

On a different note, Tamar Adler’s An Everlasting Meal carries that sensibility forward through continuity and reuse. One meal becomes the next. Leftovers are not an afterthought but a starting point. The creativity lies in noticing what remains and asking what else it could become. Cooking, here, is not a series of fresh starts, but rather a long, forgiving conversation with time.

That same spirit shows up in many of the cookbooks I love most:

• Gjelina reads like a study in restraint and iteration. Nothing is rushed. Nothing is showy. The confidence comes from attention, not spectacle.

• Yotam Ottolenghi’s work — I think I own almost all of his cookbooks (there are many), but my initiation was with Jerusalem, which is a stunning book that treats cooking as a dialogue between cultures, geographies, and memories. His recipes feel expansive, generous without being rigid. Especially because some of the ingredients are difficult to find, they reward intuition much more than precision.

• Another favorite is The Immigrant Cookbook: Recipes that Make America Great. Here, food is a record, an adaptation, an inheritance in motion. Recipes become stories of arrival, translation, and reinvention. I can attest that this living archive is as varied as it is delicious.

• Because I grew up in Mexico, I have a soft spot for Alex Stupak’s Tacos: Recipes and Provocations, because it is indeed provocative. Technique matters, sure, but so does questioning what’s essential and what can be reimagined.

• And then there are quieter books like Yvette van Boven’s Home Made (she has a whole series, including a Christmas version), which celebrate the everyday ingenuity of cooking without overthinking it. It feels like a summer in the French countryside: practical, playful, and observant.

What all of these books share is a refusal of performance. They don’t promise mastery, they offer practice through play, i.e. learning through repetition, feedback, and low-stakes mistakes.

This month, I invite us to think about our kitchens as studios. Not places of optimization, but rather of curiosity, creativity, heat, and playfulness.

Morsel of Inspiration

let the wilderness in.
grow a forest for a heart.
make your very blood a salve
of pine and open sky.
be the air
that birds come to sing in.
the water that even rivers seek
— wild.

- Emory Hall

Until next time, stay wide.

The Shape of Time

The ancient Greeks experienced time in two distinct ways. Chronos was the time we measure: the minutes before boarding, the alarms we snooze, the logistics that fill our days. Kairos, by contrast, was the time we feel, the opportune moment, the charged pause, the instant in which something meaningful can happen. If chronos is the time of the clock, kairos is the time of the soul.

Writer Madeleine L’Engle described it beautifully:

“The child at play, the painter at his easel, Serkin playing the Appassionata are in kairos. The saint in prayer, friends around the dinner table, the mother reaching out her arms for her newborn baby are in kairos.”

Modern psychology has found language for what the Greeks intuited. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow—that sense of total absorption in an activity—mirrors kairos. Research from the University of Chicago and the University of Copenhagen shows that during flow, our perception of time literally alters. Brain regions tied to self-consciousness and temporal awareness quiet, replaced by a sense of deep engagement and meaning. In contrast, chronos dominates much of modern life with its obsession for efficiency and measurement, often leaving us organized but hollow.

Philosopher Abraham Heschel described the Sabbath as “a cathedral in time,” a pause meant to remind us that time itself can be sacred. Neuroscience and contemplative studies now echo his insight. Moments of deliberate stillness—a breath, a shared silence, a ritual meal—calm the amygdala, restore attention, and return us to presence. Kairos, then, is not just poetic. It is also physiological.

But kairos asks something of us: to be awake, aware, available. These moments of possibility appear quietly, in bus terminals and grocery lines, in the unguarded second before a big decision. They do not wait for perfect conditions. They wait for our noticing.

Real life still demands chronos: schedules, deadlines, flights to catch. The point is not to escape it but to weave the two, to remember that even within the clock’s relentless rhythm, moments of kairos can arrive if we are paying attention.

When I think about this, the panic of rushing to the airport (because I am always inevitably late) feels almost embarrassingly small. The larger question becomes: how might we move through time differently? What happens when we stop treating every minute as a resource to be managed and start treating it as a medium to be inhabited?

Perhaps the invitation is simply this: to live time not as something that passes, but as something we can meet.

Listenin’ & Readin’

Because sometimes a good paragraph hits harder than a green juice.

🎧 Podcast: The Ezra Klein Show — “Why Adults Lose the Beginner’s Mind”
Listen on Spotify
Ezra Klein talks with psychologist and author Alison Gopnik about why children learn so fluidly and why adults often lose that open, experimental curiosity. They explore the neuroscience of learning, the value of wonder, and how age shifts our attention from exploration to efficiency. The conversation invites a simple but radical question: how might we recover the beginner’s mind without giving up the wisdom of experience?

🎧 Podcast: On Being with Alain de Botton — “The True Hard Work of Love and Relationships”
Listen/Read here
Philosopher Alain de Botton offers a disarmingly honest exploration of love, not as a feeling but as a discipline. He speaks with Krista Tippett about how romantic ideals often sabotage real intimacy, and how the ordinary work of patience, forgiveness, and curiosity is what makes love enduring. It is a conversation about maturity in an age that confuses desire with devotion, and about how growth often begins the moment the fantasy ends.

🎧 Podcast: Radiolab — “What Up Holmes?”
Listen on Spotify

Love it or hate it, the freedom to say obnoxious, dissenting, and even subversive things is part of what defines America. But our near-absolute approach to free speech is surprisingly recent and can be traced to a single figure: Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. During one pivotal eight-month period, Holmes made a dramatic reversal in his view of what should be sayable, and that turn of mind reshaped American law. Radiolab unpacks how and why he changed, weaving a story of anarchists, friendship, and moral awakening. It is a meditation on courage, conscience, and how one mind can change the course of a nation.

🎧📚 Jerry Colonna — Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up
Reboot Podcast | Buy the Book
Recommended by my cofounder and well worth the listen or the read. Colonna, a former venture capitalist turned executive coach, writes and speaks about leadership as an act of self-discovery. Through radical self-inquiry, he challenges the myth that growth requires armor. Instead, he offers a more disarming truth: the best leaders are the ones willing to be seen. Reboot is part guide, part mirror, a work that invites us to meet our work and ourselves with more honesty and less fear.

📚 Book: Breakneck — Dan Wang
Buy the Book
Currently on my nightstand. In Breakneck, Wang chronicles the paradoxes of modern China’s innovation economy: the speed of development, the human cost of ambition, and the tension between technological progress and moral purpose. It is part travelogue, part economic meditation, part cultural mirror, a sharp lens on what it means to build, scale, and live in an era moving faster than comprehension.

This Month’s Nudge

Seek the blue 🌊

We’ve long known that green spaces — parks, gardens, forests — soothe the mind and steady the body. But a growing body of research suggests that blue spaces may hold an even deeper kind of calm. Oceans, lakes, rivers, and even small fountains appear to ease mental distress, reduce antidepressant use, and foster both resilience and joy.

Environmental psychologist Mathew White and colleagues have found that people who regularly encounter blue and green spaces report better sleep, stronger social bonds, and higher life satisfaction. The reason isn’t only visual. Blue spaces engage multiple senses: the smell of salt, the shimmer of light on water, the rhythm of waves. Together, these elements trigger physiological relaxation responses, thus lowering heart rate and cortisol, slowing respiration, and syncing us to gentler rhythms.

Some researchers call this the “aquatic awe effect.” Simply gazing at open water can induce mild meditative states and help reset our attention. Even virtual exposure — listening to water sounds, or looking at images of waves — has been shown to improve mood and focus.

But the greatest benefit may be relational. People tend to gather by water: to swim, talk, watch sunsets, or just sit. Social scientists note that blue spaces promote what they call soft fascination, an effortless kind of attention that frees the mind to wander and connect. It is the opposite of doomscrolling, the antidote to overstimulation.

So the next time you can, go toward the water. Sit by a lake, walk along the ocean, linger at the edge of a pool, even listen to rain. Let the horizon steady you, the sound rinse your nervous system, the color remind you how vast and simple healing can be.

Your body already knows this: we come from water, we are mostly water, and sometimes we just need to go home to remember.

Creative Curiosities

Wifredo Lam and the Dreaming Imagination

Born in Cuba to Chinese and Afro-Caribbean parents, Wifredo Lam defied every boundary of 20th-century modernism. His paintings fused Surrealism, Cubism, and Santería symbolism into dreamscapes where figures dissolve into forests and masks become spirits.

As MoMA’s new retrospective When I Don’t Sleep, I Dream shows, Lam’s work was never just aesthetic; it was political, an act of decolonization. After years in war-torn Europe, exile sharpened his sense of purpose: to paint a world that honored the beauty, mystery, and depth of Black diasporic culture. His canvases disrupt Western hierarchies by blending the sacred and the sensual, the ancestral and the avant-garde.

Lam once said, “A true picture has the power to set the imagination to work, even if it takes time.” His art still does exactly that. In his hands, dreaming becomes resistance, a way of reclaiming imagination from the forces that try to contain it.

To stand before his paintings is to glimpse what it means to belong everywhere and nowhere, to see that even in sleeplessness, there is vision.

Learn more about the exhibition →

Morsel of Inspiration

“The world is not comprehensible, but it is embraceable.”

— Martin Buber

“Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement […] To get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.”

— Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel:

Until next time, stay wide.

In Praise of Small Talk

We (myself included) tend to hold up big talk as the pinnacle of human connection—the late-night conversations about love, loss, or what it all means. And it’s true: depth matters. But a growing body of research reminds us that small talk—those everyday exchanges about the weather, your barista’s bizarre latte art, or a shared groan at the weather—carries its own quiet power.

Psychologist Gillian Sandstrom (University of Sussex) has led some of the most compelling work in this area. In a landmark 2014 study, she and colleague Elizabeth Dunn found that simply chatting with a server, rather than rushing through a transaction, left participants feeling more cheerful and socially connected. Follow-up studies have shown that even brief interactions with acquaintances and strangers correlate with higher wellbeing, less loneliness, and a greater sense of belonging.

Small talk may seem trivial, but it creates what psychologists call weak ties—looser, lighter connections beyond our immediate circles. Sociologist Mark Granovetter famously argued that weak ties often matter more than strong ones: they bring us new ideas, job opportunities, and perspectives. More recently, research published in Nature Communications (2022) confirmed that having a greater number of weak ties is strongly associated with higher levels of wellbeing and social integration.

There’s also a cognitive benefit. Engaging in small talk sharpens our conversational agility—we practice reading cues, shifting topics, and creating micro-moments of rapport. Neuroscientists studying social interaction note that even light exchanges activate the brain’s reward circuitry, releasing dopamine and oxytocin that reinforce trust and connection.

And then there’s serendipity. A quick word with a neighbor might blossom into friendship. A joke with a stranger in line might make the whole day feel lighter. As behavioral scientist Nicholas Epley has shown in his research on commuting, people consistently underestimate how much they will enjoy—and benefit from—talking to strangers. Almost universally, participants who struck up conversations on trains or buses reported more positive experiences than those who kept to themselves.

The lesson? Big talk and small talk aren’t opposites—they’re companions. Small talk opens the door to big talk, but it also has standalone value: stitching us into the wider social fabric, giving us micro-doses of joy, and reminding us that connection doesn’t always require profundity. Sometimes it just requires a smile, an offhand comment, or a shared moment of “me too” or “amiright?”

Listenin’ & Readin’

Because sometimes a good paragraph hits harder than a green juice.

📰 Financial Times
Chef Samin Nosrat: “So much of cooking is about being present”
This profile of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat author Samin Nosrat is a meditation on how presence transforms both cooking and living. Nosrat reminds us that recipes are less about rigid steps and more about sensing—tasting, smelling, noticing. The piece draws a line between the kitchen and everyday life: both ask for attention, care, and a willingness to adjust as you go. It’s an elegant reminder that connection is not in the perfected dish, but in the act of showing up fully.

📰 The Atlantic
The Discourse Is Broken
Charlie Warzel uses the uproar over Sydney Sweeney’s American Eagle ad earlier this summer to illustrate how online conversation has fractured. Outrage cycles no longer resemble dialogue but instead a chain of performative statements, each post feeding the algorithmic mill, stripped of nuance and inflated by amplification. Real political concerns (eugenics, pronatalism, white supremacy) are flattened into memes and culture-war fodder, while media and influencers alike benefit from the churn. The essay asks whether what we call “discourse” is really just grist for platforms designed to keep us angry, entertained, and endlessly scrolling.

🎧 Podcast: Radiolab
Quantum Birds
A wondrous dive into how migrating birds may “see” Earth’s magnetic field via quantum effects in the eye—specifically radical-pair reactions in the protein cryptochrome. The episode traces the idea from fringe to front-row science, with recent lab work showing magnetic sensitivity in European robin CRY4 and accessible explainers on the physics that might underlie an animal compass. A rare case where awe and rigor meet.

🎧 Podcast: Conversations with Tyler
Paul Graham on Writing, Startups, and Taste
This is not a new episode, but it is worth revisiting. In it, Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator, sits down with Tyler Cowen for a wide-ranging conversation that touches on startup culture, the discipline of writing, and how taste shapes both art and entrepreneurship. The discussion is as much about philosophy as it is about technology: what makes a founder compelling, how essays clarify thinking, and why cultivating taste is inseparable from cultivating judgment. A rewarding listen for anyone building or creating.

🎧 Podcast: Honestly with Bari Weiss
Justice Amy Coney Barrett
In a rare extended interview, Justice Barrett reflects on her path to the Supreme Court, her judicial philosophy, and her new book Listening to the Law. She talks with Bari Weiss about originalism, landmark cases from Dobbs to affirmative action, her surprising alignments with liberal justices, and what it means to serve without seeking approval from presidents or the press. The conversation is less about ideology than about the discipline of interpretation and the role of listening—to text, to context, to dissent—in a polarized era. Regardless of your politics, it is an interesting read in today’s world.

📚 Book
Stalin and the Scientists
Simon Ings chronicles the uneasy dance between science and power in Stalin’s Soviet Union, where curiosity was often a dangerous trait. The book explores how ideology bent scientific inquiry and how scientists navigated a system that could reward brilliance and punish dissent with equal force. Beyond history, it’s a study in the fragile contract between knowledge and authority, and a warning about what happens when politics dictates truth.

This Month’s Nudge

Kiss for your gut 💋

Fermented foods like kimchi and kombucha often steal the spotlight when it comes to gut health. But research suggests another, more unexpected practice might help diversify your microbiome: kissing.

A 2014 Dutch study published in Microbiome found that a 10-second French kiss can transfer as many as 80 million bacteria (I recommend not thinking about this too much), reshaping the microbial ecosystem in your mouth and gut. Partners who kiss often were shown to have more similar microbiota profiles, suggesting a kind of microbial cohabitation. Far from being random, these exchanges may help “train” the immune system, expose us to new bacterial strains, and build resilience against stressors.

The gut-kiss connection doesn’t stop there. Other studies highlight that microbial diversity—whether from fermented foods, soil exposure, pets, or close contact with humans—is a cornerstone of overall health. Greater diversity in the gut microbiome has been linked not just to better digestion and immune defense, but also to improved mental health, reduced inflammation, and lower risk of metabolic disorders. In fact, psychiatrists studying the “gut-brain axis” increasingly see microbial richness as central to regulating mood and anxiety.

Which brings us back to kissing: unlike a probiotic pill or a bowl of sauerkraut, a kiss offers an intimate, joyful way to increase microbial variety. It’s a small act of connection that simultaneously boosts oxytocin and dopamine (neurochemicals tied to bonding and pleasure) while quietly enriching your internal ecosystem.

In other words: a kiss a day might not only keep the doctor away, but keep your microbiome chugging along nicely too. Like we needed another excuse…

Creative Curiosities

The Mystery of Vivian Maier

Few artists embody enigma like Vivian Maier. A nanny by trade, she spent decades quietly documenting life on the streets of Chicago and New York with her Rolleiflex camera. When her work was discovered after her death in 2009 — more than 100,000 negatives tucked away in storage lockers—it stunned the art world. Here was a body of street photography rivaling the greats: sharp, empathetic, unflinching. And yet Maier never sought recognition, exhibitions, or even community with other artists.

Her story raises uncomfortable questions. Unlike most photographers, Maier didn’t edit or curate her archive. Many rolls were never even developed. Her legacy is shaped largely by strangers who bought her storage lots, restored her work, and decided what the world would see. That makes her both author and absence: a genius whose oeuvre is partly curated by others, raising questions of ownership, intention, and authenticity.

The duality of her life deepens the puzzle. As a nanny, she was embedded in family life yet never quite belonged. That mirrors her photography: intimately close to her subjects, yet always behind the lens. Accounts describe her as eccentric and secretive—locking doors, using pseudonyms, hoarding newspapers. Her self-portraits—reflections in shop windows, shadows cast on sidewalks—almost anticipate her eventual discovery, leaving riddles rather than explanations.

Maier’s invisibility is part of her resonance. Caregiving is often overlooked, undervalued, and invisible labor. She seemed drawn to the same in her photography: fleeting expressions, strangers mid-step, overlooked edges of city life. She bore witness to what most ignored.

And perhaps that’s why her work unsettles us today. In an era when everyone documents everything, Maier’s compulsion to photograph without audience feels radical. She wasn’t chasing commissions or likes; she photographed because she had to. Her life poses a challenge: is art only valid when recognized, or is its essence in the act of creation itself?

Vivian Maier lived almost invisible, but left behind a vision impossible to forget, a paradox that keeps us wondering whether her anonymity was accident, defiance, or the truest expression of her art.

Morsel of Inspiration

“To create one’s own world […] takes courage. It is not a matter of telling the truth, but of being able to survive the truth. To create is to be alive, and to be alive is to be vulnerable. This vulnerability is the source of fear, and also the source of growth. People cling to masks because they fear the consequences of being seen, and yet it is only in being seen that they are truly alive. The paradox is that the more one risks, the more life one has.”

— James Baldwin

Until next time, stay wide.

Radical Generosity: An Economy of Abundance

We tend to think of generosity as a social virtue, a matter of character or morality. But the deeper I’ve been reading on the subject, the clearer it becomes: generosity is not just a nicety, it’s a system—one that reshapes our health, our relationships, and our communities.

Biology is the most persuasive advocate. A 2003 study published in Psychological Science found that giving money away activated the brain’s mesolimbic reward system—the same circuitry triggered by food and sex. A 2006 University of Michigan study revealed that older adults who volunteered regularly had a 44% lower mortality rate over five years than non-volunteers. Johns Hopkins researchers have shown that generosity reduces blood pressure as effectively as many prescribed medications. And in a longitudinal study at the University of California, Santa Barbara, people who consistently practiced generosity reported greater life satisfaction, resilience, and lower rates of depression.

The ripple effects are not just personal. A Harvard Business School experiment demonstrated that employees who spent money on coworkers rather than themselves boosted team morale and performance. In leadership circles, what’s now being called “radical generosity” is reframing strategy itself. As Rolling Stone put it, “give first” ecosystems build trust flywheels that compound faster than transactional networks ever could.

Which reframes generosity altogether. If it lowers stress, strengthens immunity, increases longevity, and fuels collective trust, then it is not self-sacrifice;,it is self-preservation. An operating system rooted in circulation rather than accumulation.

Radical generosity, then, is less about scale than about stance. It is not the occasional charitable gesture, but the decision to orient toward abundance in small, daily ways: to give attention in a distracted world, patience in an impatient one, forgiveness where grudges would calcify.

The ROI of generosity is not just economic. It is existential. It offers us the chance to live in an economy of abundance, even in a culture addicted to scarcity.

Listenin’ & Readin’

Because sometimes a good paragraph hits harder than a green juice.

📰 The Wall Street Journal
Goodbye, Gentle Parenting
The past decade crowned “gentle parenting” as the north star of raising children with empathy and attunement. But this piece argues that in softening every edge, we may have lost something essential: boundaries, resilience, the ability to tolerate discomfort. It’s a provocative read that asks whether compassion without structure sets up both parents and children for failure. At its core, it’s a reflection on how love requires not just gentleness but also the sturdiness of limits.

📚 Book: Bad Therapy
Abigail Shrier’s Bad Therapy is less a takedown of therapy itself than a sharp examination of how an overgrown industry can unintentionally erode resilience. Shrier argues that we’ve medicalized normal discomfort, pathologized adolescence, and sometimes created dependency rather than strength. The book is a controversial take on contemporary parenting, but that’s part of its value—it forces us to sit with uncomfortable questions about when help becomes harm, and what we might reclaim if we trusted ourselves, our communities, our children, and our ordinary capacities for healing, growing, becoming.

This Month’s Nudge

Generosity as Daily Medicine

To continue, this newsletter’s theme, a growing body of research makes the same point: generosity is as good for us as it is for others.

In one study from the University of Zurich, people instructed to spend money on others showed measurable increases in happiness compared to those who spent it on themselves—changes that persisted for weeks. A 2016 experiment found that even planning to be generous activated the brain’s ventral striatum, a region linked to reward and motivation. Carnegie Mellon researchers discovered that adults who volunteered at least 200 hours per year reduced their risk of hypertension by 40%. Another meta-analysis linked consistent generosity to lower rates of depression and greater resilience during times of stress.

Why? Neuroscience points to the release of dopamine, oxytocin, and endorphins—chemicals that not only boost mood but also regulate stress and strengthen immune function. Generosity also deepens social connection, which itself is a protective factor against premature mortality. Loneliness, after all, is as deadly as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day.

So here’s this month’s nudge: treat generosity like you would exercise or nutrition—not as a luxury, but as daily medicine. Every day, find one act: a message of encouragement, a small favor, five minutes of undivided presence. These are micro-doses of abundance that accumulate into resilience.

Because generosity doesn’t empty us; it multiplies. It rewires our brains, heals our bodies, and reminds us that the surest way to feel less alone is to make someone else feel less alone.

Creative Curiosities

Frida Kahlo: Timekeeper of the Unfinished

Frida Kahlo is everywhere—on t-shirts, tote bags, tequila bottles—but a new installation in Mexico City resists the flattening of her image. Dozens of clocks, each stopped at the exact time of her death, hang suspended in silence. A roomful of halted hours, refusing to tick forward.

Time was never neutral for Kahlo. A bus accident at age eighteen left her with a broken spine, shattered pelvis, and dozens of fractures. She endured more than thirty surgeries across her life. Bedridden, she taught herself to paint with a mirror affixed above her bed, turning her body into both subject and prison. “I paint myself because I am so often alone,” she once said. Her canvases became both companions and evidence: a diary in oil and bone.

And yet, for all her pain, her life was also defined by intensity—by love as much as suffering. Her correspondence with Diego Rivera, captured in diaries and letters, is fierce, messy, and breathtakingly alive. “Nothing compares to your hands, nothing like the green-gold of your eyes,” she once wrote. “My body is filled with you for days and days. You are the mirror of the night.” These letters remind us that Kahlo was not only painting her solitude, but also writing her devotion, carrying love into the same realm as art: unsparing, volcanic, unfinished.

The stopped clocks do more than memorialize her death. They ask us to reconsider how we measure a life. Is it in years accumulated, or in voltage lived? Kahlo’s time was fractured, but she saturated each fragment—gardening with monkeys and parrots, painting corsets into sculptures, firing a revolver at Rivera in one of their legendary quarrels. She embraced contradiction: fiercely political yet deeply personal, rooted in Mexico yet cosmopolitan, fragile in body yet ferocious in spirit.

The clocks remind us that she did not seek immortality through preservation, but through intensity. A body marked by limitation, an art marked by defiance, and a love that still smolders in her words decades later.

Explore the clocks →
Read her love letters →

Morsel of Inspiration

“Fall in love and stay in love. Explode. Don’t intellectualize. Get passionate about ideas. Cram your head full of images. Stay in the library. Stay off the internet and all that crap. Read all the great books. Read all the great poetry. See all the great films. Fill your life with metaphors. And then explode.

— Ray Bradbury

Until next time, stay wide.

Permission to Play

I’ve been speaking about this recently with certain frequency, as a good friend of mine has launched a podcast on the topic. And the more I revisit it, the more essential it feels—not just culturally, but biologically. We often think of play as a luxury—something we grow out of, or maybe circle back to when we have time. But play is not childish. It’s not optional. And the science is clear: it’s foundational to a well-lived life.

Dr. Stuart Brown, founder of the National Institute for Play, has spent decades studying the role of play in human development and adult wellbeing. His research reveals that play is not frivolous—it’s a biological drive as integral as sleep or nutrition. In fact, Brown has found that a lack of play is correlated with patterns of depression, poor impulse control, and even violence. His conclusion? “The opposite of play is not work. It’s depression.”

So what is play, really? Researchers define it as an activity that is apparently purposeless, voluntary, inherently attractive, and done for its own sake. It often involves improvisation, repetition with variation, and an altered sense of time. And while we associate play with games or sports, it can take many forms: storytelling, joking, exploring, role-playing, building, dancing. It’s less about what you’re doing, and more about how you’re doing it.

From an evolutionary standpoint, play helps us test ideas, build social bonds, and prepare for uncertainty. In childhood, it's how we experiment with roles, practice emotional regulation, and learn to navigate group dynamics. In adulthood, we often forget this—until burnout, loneliness, or stagnation remind us that life without play is not sustainable.

Neurologically, play lights up many of the same brain circuits as curiosity and creativity. It boosts dopamine, reduces cortisol, and promotes neuroplasticity—the brain's ability to form new connections. According to Jaak Panksepp, a neuroscientist known for identifying play circuits in the brains of mammals, social play may be a primal need rooted deep in the brainstem. When we play, we aren't just unwinding—we’re rewiring.

One 2013 study published in American Journal of Play found that adults who engaged in regular play scored higher on measures of stress resilience, adaptability, and innovation. Another, from The Journal of Positive Psychology (2015), showed that a playful attitude was associated with greater life satisfaction and stronger interpersonal relationships.

And in workplaces? Wharton professor Ethan Mollick and organizational psychologist Adam Grant have both highlighted how play and lightheartedness enhance creative problem-solving, build psychological safety, and foster team cohesion. Serious play, it turns out, is serious business.

So why don’t we prioritize it? Partly because play often resists measurement. It doesn’t slot neatly into productivity frameworks. It doesn’t have an outcome we can track. But that’s exactly the point. Play is presence. It’s possibility. It’s how we metabolize the complexity of being alive—by giving ourselves room to experiment without consequence.

And like creativity, play can be practiced.

Trying something new and low-stakes. Letting yourself be bad at something. Losing track of time. Being silly on purpose. Creating just for the joy of it. These are not escapes from “real life”—they are reminders that aliveness is its own kind of work.

Whatever decisions you make this week, I hope they are threaded with that spirit. Explore the serious edges of joy, the freedom of uncertainty, the elegance of contradiction. Because in the right light, listening is a kind of play. So is curiosity. So is changing your mind. So is saying yes and jumping in.

And so the question isn’t whether we should play more, but how—and how often—we’ll let it change us.

Listenin’ & Readin’

Because sometimes a good paragraph hits harder than a green juice.

📰 The New York Times
Article: Andrea Gibson, the Poet of Radical Tenderness
Andrea Gibson’s poetry has been a companion through some of my most tender, electric, and cracked-open moments. This tribute captures the depth of their work and the grace with which they navigated illness, identity, and love. Their passing hit hard. If you’ve never read their work, start with The Year of No Grudges. If you have, read it again. Their legacy is proof that words can keep people alive in us.

🎧 Freakonomics Radio
Episode: How to Make Your Own Luck
Before she became a poker pro, Maria Konnikova didn’t even know how many cards were in a deck. But she did have a Ph.D. in psychology and a question that drove her: Is life ruled more by skill or by chance? In this episode, she breaks down what poker taught her about luck, risk, attention, and decision-making—both at the table and in the world. A sharp, surprising conversation on uncertainty and control.

🎧 Revisionist History
Episode: King of Tears
Part of his “Encore: series, Malcolm Gladwell brings back this old episode and asks why country music makes us cry more than any other genre—and in doing so, unlocks something profound about vulnerability, storytelling, and emotional specificity. Even if you’re not a country fan, this episode will give you a whole new lens on music, sadness, and why some songs hit bone-deep.

🎧 Honestly with Bari Weiss
Episode: The Words That Made America
This episode caught me off guard—in the best way. Bari Weiss speaks with Yale constitutional scholar Akhil Reed Amar about the ideals, contradictions, and sheer improbability of the American experiment. What unfolds is less a civics lesson and more a love letter to the messiness and brilliance of this country. It’s a conversation full of tension, reverence, and real clarity about what’s worth preserving. I came away more moved than I expected, and honestly, a little prouder to call this place home.

This Month’s Nudge

On Friendship: The Ones Who Hold the Mirror and the Rope

This year, I’ve been especially grateful for friendship. Maybe it’s the richness of certain conversations. Maybe it’s the clarity that comes when you mourn a friendship, or two. But I’ve found myself thinking more deeply about the people who stand beside us in both the quiet and the chaos. The ones who make us feel less alone in the becoming. The ones who tether us back to ourselves.

It’s occurred to me that the people closest to our hearts choose the difficult task of loving two versions of us at once: who we are, and who we’re still trying to become. It’s not easy to do this without judgment, to see someone clearly in both their mess and their magic, to believe in their future while holding space for their present. But when we find the rare few who can walk beside us in that in-between—and can bridge the gap with accountability, but tenderness and ideally humor—we’d do well to hold onto them with both hands.

Arthur Brooks, building on Aristotle, describes three kinds of friendship:

• Friendships of utility
  Grounded in mutual benefit—your gym buddy, your carpool partner, your startup co-founder. These friendships serve a function and often fade when the usefulness fades.

• Friendships of pleasure
  Rooted in shared interests, laughter, fun. They bring lightness and warmth, but often shift or vanish as our seasons change.

• Friendships of virtue
  The rarest kind. These aren’t about what someone does for you or how they make you feel. They’re about mutual growth, deep respect, and the long-haul work of helping each other become more whole. These are the people who call us out and call us in. Who challenge us to stay close to our values. Who weather the seasons. Who choose us, again and again, even as we evolve.

These “virtue friendships” are what Socrates and his fellow philosophers saw as not just desirable, but essential. In Plato’s dialogues, Socrates treats friendship as a pathway to truth and virtue. He believed our most important task in life is to know ourselves, and that this kind of knowing doesn’t happen in isolation, but rather that it happens in relationship. Through dialogue. Through friction. Through reflection. Through being seen.

Socrates didn’t care much for small talk. To him, a true friend wasn’t someone who merely made you feel good, but someone who sharpened you. Challenged your assumptions. Held up a mirror not to flatter you, but to help you examine your life more honestly. In this way, friendship wasn’t ornamental; it was fundamental. It was the primary container and safe space for our growth.

Brené Brown echoes this beautifully: “True belonging doesn’t require us to change who we are. It requires us to be who we are.” Good friends make that possible. They let us be seen in all our contradiction—unfinished, unsure, still becoming. They don’t flinch when it’s messy. They don’t disappear when it’s unclear or difficult. They don’t demand neat edges or tidy answers. They stand close to the fire, and they respect our autonomy enough to let us face it as we need to.

Esther Perel says, “Friendship is a kind of love story.” And it is. Not loud or performative. Not always easy. But a continued choosing, intimate in the truest sense, woven over the years and a shared practice in remembering who someone is beneath the noise of the moment…and helping them remember, too.

It’s kind of radical, if you think about it—that we keep these people. Through years of questioning, through detours, mistakes, bigger mistakes, triumphs, grief, becoming different individuals (sometimes worse, sometimes better), competing priorities. And still, we labor and choose to keep them.

So here’s to the ones who hold our hand in our becoming. Who dance with us in the liminal. Who laugh with us in the chaos. Who don’t expect us to collapse into clarity when we don’t have it. Who make us feel worthy and deeply, fully loved. Who are brave with us, and brave for us. May we be that kind of friend. May we recognize those who already are. And may we never forget that the best friendships are not found—they are made, and remade, chosen every day, over time.

Creative Curiosities

The Fierce Freedom of Josef Koudelka

There’s a kind of photography that feels like choreography—the moment just before the leap, the breath before the break. That’s how Josef Koudelka’s work lands: not as documentation, but as visual poetry, ragged and precise, still and electric at once.

Koudelka is best known for three bodies of work: Gypsies (a haunting portrayal of Roma communities in Eastern Europe), Invasion 68 (his secret, devastating photographs of the Soviet invasion of Prague), and Exiles (a visual meditation on rootlessness). All three explore people and places at the margins—socially, physically, psychically. And all of them echo with solitude, not as loneliness, but as a form of vision.

What makes Koudelka’s work singular isn’t just its content, though. It’s the man behind the lens. He was an engineer before he was a photographer. He fled Czechoslovakia with just a few rolls of film. He lived nomadically for decades—no home, no bank account, no possessions besides his camera and his negatives. He photographed obsessively, and for years, almost anonymously. When his Invasion photos were first published, they appeared under the initials P.P. (Prague Photographer) to protect him from state persecution. It wasn’t until years later that the world learned who had risked everything to take them.

Despite winning some of photography’s highest honors—including membership in Magnum, the Grand Prix National de la Photographie, and the Hasselblad Award—Koudelka has never been a household name. Partly because he never wanted to be. He avoided commercial work. He refused assignments. He didn’t photograph to sell or promote—he photographed to see. And perhaps because his work exists in a space that defies easy consumption: too human for abstraction, too raw for sentimentality, too unflinching for mass appeal.

There was controversy, too. Gypsies, published in 1975, was both lauded and critiqued. Some praised it as a stunning tribute to vanishing cultures. Others saw it as romanticizing poverty or perpetuating outsider voyeurism. But Koudelka never claimed to speak for anyone—only to witness. The images aren’t explanatory. They don’t pretend to offer context. They leave you in the moment, unsettled and alive.

There’s a strange kind of play in Koudelka’s photographs—not lightness, but freedom. He embraced constraint as a medium. He worked without a darkroom. He printed in makeshift studios. He once said, “I am not interested in making books or exhibitions. I am interested in photographing.” And it shows. His images don’t feel made; they feel found.

If you’re new to his work, start with Exiles or the panoramic landscapes in Chaos. If you’re curious about the man, look up the short documentary Josef Koudelka: Shooting Holy Land. Or just pick one image and sit with it. Let it open.

Because if creativity is about paying attention—and play is about giving yourself over to the moment—then Koudelka’s work might be one of the purest intersections of both.

Morsel of Inspiration

“You have to pick the places you don’t walk away from.” — Joan Didion

Until next time, stay wide.

Where Creativity Lives

We’ve all heard it: “I’m more right-brained” or “She’s left-brained and analytical.” It’s a tidy way to make sense of how we think—but neuroscience tells a far more intricate (and interesting) story.

The idea that the right hemisphere governs creativity while the left handles logic is a popular myth, but it's been widely debunked by researchers. While some functions—like language—tend to be more lateralized, creativity is not housed in one hemisphere. It’s a whole-brain process, drawing on networks that span memory, emotion, abstraction, and pattern recognition.

Studies using brain imaging (like fMRI) show that creative thinking activates regions across both hemispheres. In a 2013 study published in PLOS ONE, researchers found no evidence that people are "left-brained" or "right-brained"—instead, both hemispheres work together during cognitive tasks (Nielsen et al., 2013).

More recent research by cognitive neuroscientist Roger Beaty reveals that creativity draws on three key brain networks working in concert:

• The default mode network, active when we’re daydreaming or imagining, is responsible for generating original, unconstrained ideas.

• The executive control network, which handles focus, planning, and self-monitoring, helps shape and refine those ideas.

• And the salience network, which evaluates emotional relevance and novelty, acts as a switchboard—determining which ideas are worth exploring further (Beaty et al., 2015).

Perhaps not surprisingly, it turns out that experience shapes brain use. Skilled musicians or artists may rely more on left-hemispheric pathways when engaging in creative work that involves well-learned routines, while more improvisational or emotionally expressive tasks may engage the right hemisphere (Dietrich, 2004).

In short: creativity doesn’t live in one part of the brain—it lives in the connections. It's less about sides and more about synergy.

And so, it turns out: creativity isn’t fixed, and neuroscience confirms that we can foment and strengthen the brain’s creative networks with intention and practice. How?

• New and varied experiences—especially those that challenge assumptions—help strengthen connectivity between the default mode and executive control networks (Beaty et al., 2018).

• Deliberate mind-wandering (with the ability to refocus) engages both ideation and evaluation processes, increasing creative output (Christoff et al., 2009).

• Meditation and mindfulness practices enhance the salience network, improving cognitive flexibility and the ability to shift between internal and external attention (Tang et al., 2015).

• Creative training, like improvisation or expressive writing, measurably strengthens the connectivity between these networks (Fink et al., 2010).

In other words, we can practice creativity neurologically, not just artistically. Each time we let our minds roam, reframe a problem, or try something unfamiliar, we’re not only being creative, we’re building the scaffolding for more creativity to come. So this month, instead of thinking about left vs. right, what if we honored the richness of the middle? The unpredictable, electric space between intuition and intellect, structure and surprise.

Listenin’ & Readin’

Because sometimes a good paragraph hits harder than a green juice.

📖 How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big by Scott Adams
Best known as the creator of the Dilbert comic strip, Adams steps out of cartoon panels and into personal philosophy. Part memoir, part mental reframe, the book argues that goals are fragile but systems are resilient; that passion is overrated, but personal energy is the real compass. The standout idea: “skill stacking”—becoming above average at multiple things to compound your odds of success. A refreshingly unconventional take on ambition, failure, and how to set yourself up so luck is more likely to find you.

🎧 Honestly with Bari Weiss
Episode: How to Examine Your Marriage—and Your Life
Bari Weiss sits down with philosopher Agnes Callard, who shares a deeply unconventional story: she divorced her husband, married her lover, and now cohabitates with both men, raising children together under one roof. It's a radically honest exploration of love, partnership, divorce, and change, and what emerges is less a sensational tale and more a meditation on partnership, reinvention, and what it means to live an examined life. A provocative listen that will linger with you.

🎧 The Ezra Klein Show
Episode: Is This America’s Golden Age? A Debate
In the spirit of healthy debate, Ezra Klein, Ben Rhodes, Kevin Roberts, and Kellyanne Conway argue about whether America is in a modern “golden age.” The conversation spans optimism, national identity, economic narratives, and the soul of a country in flux. It covers everything from institutional trust and the balance of power, to culture and policy—as well as some philosophizing on a nation's "virtue." It is rare to enjoy a debate as much as I enjoyed this one; you may not agree with every take, but you'll come away sharper for having listened.

This Month’s Nudge

Of Grief & Grace

Grief has had a myriad ways of showing up recently. It’s not the dramatic kind, but much quieter—the kind that drips, not crashes. That gathers in corners. That doesn’t have a name or a headline, just a weight that sometimes surprises you in the middle of the afternoon. Ambient grief. Accumulated grief. The kind that doesn’t announce itself but rearranges you anyway.

And yet, even here—sometimes especially here—there’s also a doorway to something else. Not silver linings. Not forced meaning. But the privilege of heightened contrast: collateral beauty, the unexpected, unsummoned grace that lives alongside the ache. Like the way everything in the foreground seems brighter, more acute, against the darkening sky right of a storm.

Like, have you ever...
seen early sun filter through a curtain and suddenly make dust look like confetti?
watched a toddler hand a sticker to a stranger in the checkout line?
walked past a tree the moment a single leaf let go?
noticed how wind lifts the edge of a tablecloth on a quiet patio—a small invitation?
caught someone humming to themselves on the subway, unaware, unafraid?
cooked in silent synchronicity with someone you love?
watched two people lean into each other without realizing?

Yes, grief is a long conversation—but, have you ever:
seen someone stop traffic to help an animal cross the road?
witnessed a stranger lunge to help someone without hesitation?
had the perfect bite of food?
heard a voice crack mid-song because the feeling got too big to hold?
watched someone laugh uncontrollably for the first time in a long time?
realized you never tire of someone’s presence?
felt a Sunday kind of love?

Grief doesn’t just take. It quietly, awkwardly, but insistently opens a million tiny windows through which, if we let it, comes something like awe. Not because one feeling replaces another, but because it reminds us of the ineffable interdependence between them. It strips us of our own masks and asks us to step into each morning saying:
yes, and
this, too.

So this month’s nudge is: if the air feels heavier for you lately, see what else it’s carrying. Let grief sharpen your attention to the invisible tenderness threaded through ordinary moments. Call out the collateral beauty it brings forth. Let it break you open—not just to pain, but to presence. “The wound is where the light enters you.” (Rumi)

And when words run out, let poetry take over.

Gravity
Everything falling is beautiful,
like fruits dropping,
sunlight ripened into sugar,
and girls tripping,
distracted, daydreaming;
even a city,
collapsing onto itself,
has its own collateral beauty,
aflame.

Creative Curiosities

The Pulse Beneath the Canon

I first saw Joaquin Horsley perform at a Nu Deco Ensemble concert years ago—an unexpected jolt of joy, precision, and emotional wildness. Since then, his work has stayed with me. Composer, pianist, and orchestrator, Horsley doesn’t just reinterpret music—he fuses classical foundations with Afro-Cuban rhythm, creating something that feels both rooted and entirely new.

Best known for his Beethoven in Havana series, he blends classical Western canon with Afro-Cuban percussion, translating loss, celebration, and awe into rhythm. His music is what happens when something sacred breaks apart—and is rebuilt with even more life inside it. Horsley calls it “musical diplomacy.” I think of it as a reminder: the cracks don’t ruin the song—they let the rhythm in.

One of my favorite pieces is featured in the video below: Nu Deco Ensemble performs "Lacrimoson", a reimagining of Mozart’s Lacrimosa infused with Cuban rhythms, arranged by Horsley and conducted by Jacomo Bairos. I have several favorite moments, but there’s a section around 2:17 that I return to often. Watch the performance above.

→ And if you're curious:
🎹 Beethoven in Havana – a thunderclap of cello, conga, and clarity.
💽 Via Havana (full album) – equal parts elegance and pulse.

Morsel of Inspiration

“Even after all this time, the sun never says to the moon, ‘You owe me.’ Look what happens with a love like that—it lights the whole sky.” — Hafiz

Until next time, stay wide.

On Additive Bias in Tech (and beyond)

In behavioral science, there's a concept called additive bias: when faced with a problem, our reflex is to solve it by adding. We pile on features, policies, tools, layers—believing complexity equals progress. It rarely does.

In the tech world, additive bias shows up as:

• Product sprawl (“We’ll fix it in v12.7”)

• Org bloat (“Let’s just add another layer of management”)

• Process inflation (“We need one more dashboard to track the dashboards”)

But subtraction—deleting, simplifying, stripping things to their essence—is often more powerful. Researchers at the University of Virginia found that when people are asked to improve something, they almost never think to remove. Yet the best solutions are often reductive. The cleanest code, the tightest teams, the clearest strategies—they're all about what you don’t include.

This is the quiet brilliance of growth by subtraction: not scaling up, but paring down with intention. Making space. Letting things breathe. Choosing clarity over clutter.

This month, I’m asking:

• What am I still carrying that no longer serves?

• What am I overcomplicating?

• What could I cut that might actually let something breathe?

Less isn’t just elegant. Sometimes it’s the only way forward.

Listenin’ & Readin’

Because sometimes a good paragraph hits harder than a green juice.

📖 Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams

This isn’t a takedown. It’s something harder to swallow: an inside story told with nuance, regret, and care.

In Careless People, Sarah Wynn-Williams — a former Facebook executive — offers a deeply personal account of how idealism gets warped inside powerful institutions, and specifically how power, idealism, and the culture at Facebook became corroded over time. She doesn’t come with fire and fury. She leaves us with questions: How does a mission to connect the world become a machinery of division? How do good people stay in broken systems? How do we lose the thread?

This book is not just about Facebook. It’s about the seduction of scale, the fog of proximity to power, and the slow erosion of values in environments where winning is often confused with impact. It’s also a meditation on silence — on what we don’t say inside companies, on how culture protects certain stories and buries others.

What makes Careless People stand out is its tone: not bitter, but reckoning. Wynn-Williams wants to understand, not just indict. And that makes her narrative all the more devastating — because the damage described is both preventable and ongoing.

Since publication, Meta has taken legal action to block her from promoting the book, citing a non-disparagement clause — a move that has only drawn more attention to the story. As of this writing, promotion remains restricted, but the book continues to circulate widely and spark debate.

Read this if you’ve ever asked yourself: how do smart people become complicit? What happens to integrity under pressure? Why so many of our platforms feel hollow despite their reach. Read this especially if you work in tech, because some of the most dangerous outcomes come not from malicious actors — but from careless ones.

🗞️ The New Yorker
Article: Is Jeff Bezos Selling Out the Washington Post? by Clare Malone

This piece is a quiet autopsy of what happens when the promise of visionary leadership is replaced by executive absenteeism. Clare Malone charts the slow, almost bureaucratic unraveling of The Washington Post under Jeff Bezos—not through scandal or interference, but through something more ordinary and dangerous: neglect.

Once hailed as the billionaire who might help preserve serious journalism, Bezos now appears increasingly disengaged. The article traces a pattern of strategic misfires, unclear leadership, and a widening gap between the newsroom’s values and the owner's focus. Staff report a thinning sense of purpose, a loss of editorial clarity, and deep internal tension.

The implications go beyond the paper itself. At a time when trust in institutions is fragile and political polarization is intensifying, The Post’s identity crisis raises a larger question: What happens to democracy when our most important media institutions become afterthoughts? When ownership shifts from stewardship to disinterest?

What makes this piece land is its tone—clear-eyed, restrained, and grounded in voices from inside the building. It’s not a scandal story. It’s a systems story. And that makes it all the more urgent.

This Month’s Nudge

I read a brief post recently in favor of temporary obsessions. It posited that not everything we try has to work, not everything we love has to lead somewhere.

Some experiments are meant to be brief — a fling with a version of you not yet fully formed.

Personally, I’ve had many of these: pickling, tango lessons, perfecting a challah recipe, the list goes on. And while some faded, others quietly took root. Years ago, I started a Monday night tradition: I spend one hour doing something creative time. Over time, I’ve drawn, carved lithographs, played around with India ink. No outcome, no purpose, mainly an intention shake up and re-engage my creative capacity. The result has benefitted how creatively I show up across the board, in all my endeavors, and the energy I have to think differently.

Temporary obsessions are not failures of focus — they’re flirtations with aliveness. They’re how we metabolize transitions, rehearse new selves, overcome heartbreaks, taste new textures of being. Not everything needs to scale, be monetized, or be purposeful in order to add meaning — or expand your horizon. Over time, each new thing you pick up, is easier to pick up.

So this month’s nudge is this:
Let yourself dabble. Learn something new. Deep dive on a topic. Paint one very bad canvas. Try a new hobby, even if once. Google wildly. Write for no reason. Let the inquiry, the attempt be enough.

Creative Curiosities

The Hidden Modernism of Hilma af Klint

Before Kandinsky. Before Mondrian. Before the art world was ready — Hilma af Klint was painting portals.

A Swedish mystic and trained artist, af Klint began creating vast, abstract works in 1906, decades before abstraction would be accepted by the mainstream. But she didn’t paint for critics or patrons — she painted as a form of spiritual transmission. Guided by a group of women known as “The Five,” she believed her paintings were channeled from higher realms, meant to communicate universal truths.

She created more than 1,200 works and kept most of them hidden. In her will, she specified they not be shown until at least 20 years after her death, convinced the world wouldn’t understand them. And she was right. When the Guggenheim finally held a retrospective of her work in 2018, it became one of the most visited exhibitions in the museum’s history.

What I find most moving is her sense of purpose — not seeking validation, not chasing trends, but creating something so expansive, so attuned, so expressive, that it felt meant for another time. Her art is geometric, radiant, strange, and deeply symbolic. It doesn’t just hang. It hums.

If you’re curious: start with the documentary Beyond the Visible, or browse Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future. Her series The Ten Largest is a stunning invitation into her world — one where intuition outruns theory, and beauty arrives before understanding.

Morsel of Inspiration

“The bad news is you’re falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is, there’s no ground.” - Chögyam Trungpa

Until next time, stay wide.

What We Choose Without Choosing

Since high school, I’ve been an advocate for organ donation, not just as a personal cause, but as a case study in how our environments quietly shape our choices.

In the U.S., organ donation is an opt-in system—you have to actively say yes. That sounds reasonable… until you look across the Atlantic. In countries like Austria, France, and Belgium, organ donation is opt-out: everyone is considered a donor unless they indicate otherwise. The results? In opt-out countries, consent rates soar above 90%. In opt-in countries like ours, they hover around 15–25%.

This is partly about cultural values, but mostly about defaults. Behavioral economists Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler (Nudge) call this choice architecture. Unfortunately, we often mistake inertia for intention, and the way a choice is framed—a default vs. a deliberate act—has an outsized impact on what people do. We think of ourselves as rational actors, but more often, we just follow the path that’s laid in front of us. And in this case, a checkbox buried on a DMV form isn’t just a formality—it’s a matter of life and death.

Today, over 100,000 people in the U.S. are waiting for a life-saving organ. Every day, 17 people die waiting. The gap between those who say they support organ donation and those who are actually registered remains one of our most quietly devastating divides.

The same logic applies to the bone marrow registry. Signing up takes minutes, but without embedded defaults or normalized cultural cues, most people never do. And yet for someone with leukemia or a rare immune disorder, a match on the registry can mean the difference between treatment and terminality. This is especially urgent when it comes to equity. You’re far more likely to match with someone of your own ethnic background, and people of color are drastically underrepresented on the registry.

If you haven’t signed up yet, let this be the moment. One quiet decision, made today, could ripple into a stranger’s second chance.
👉 Register as an organ donor
👉 Join the bone marrow registry

Listenin’ & Readin’

Because sometimes a good paragraph hits harder than a green juice.

🎧 Founders
Episode: Steve Jobs & the Art of Obsession
A marathon episode that breaks down the life, quirks, and obsessive attention to detail that defined Jobs—not the myth, but the man behind it. It’s not always flattering, but it’s always fascinating. For anyone building something (or trying to), this one will have you toggling between inspiration and warning label.

🎧 Capitalisn’t
Episode: Can Capitalism Fix Itself?
A sharp, policy-driven conversation that dives into the tension between market freedom and public interest. What makes this episode great is how it avoids the usual binaries—no “burn it all down” energy, but no blind faith either. A smart listen.

🎧 Freakonomics Radio
Episode: Are You Just Following the Herd?
This episode revisits the power of defaults, social proof, and nudge theory, perfectly aligned with this month’s theme on organ donation. The takeaway: even the smallest bit of behavioral design can change everything. A classic for a reason.

📖 Born to Run by Christopher McDougall & Born to Walk by Dan Rubinstein
It started with a friend recommending Born to Run—a wild, energetic ode to endurance and the innate joy of movement. Not long after, my father (without knowing) gifted me Born to Walk, a quieter, more reflective book about how walking shapes our bodies, cities, and relationships.

I’m still making my way through both, but they’re already becoming unexpected mirrors as I revisit my relationship with running. One pulls me toward speed and exhilaration; the other invites me to slow down and pay attention. Together, they feel like a conversation—about motion, meaning, and how we find our rhythm, health, and perspective again.

📖 The Many Lives of Anne Frank by Ruth Franklin
Most of us grow up with a narrow, almost mythic version of Anne Frank—young, luminous, tragic. But Ruth Franklin opens up the fuller, messier truth of both the girl and her legacy. This book sheds light on aspects of Anne’s story that rarely make it into school curriculums or cultural shorthand: her evolving politics, her sexuality, the complexity of her family, and how her diary was edited, shaped, and sometimes heavily curated after her death.

Franklin doesn’t just reintroduce Anne—she examines how her image has been symbolized, commercialized, and politicized over time. The result is a meditation on what it means to remember someone not just as a symbol, but as a person. A necessary read for anyone interested in storytelling, history, and the moral weight of memory.

🗞️ The New Yorker
Article: Is the U.S. Becoming an Autocracy?
This isn’t a partisan panic piece—it’s a sober exploration of how systems erode, slowly and procedurally. Drawing on legal theory and international precedent, it asks what happens when norms are chipped away not with violence, but with paperwork, appointments, and rule-bending. A compelling, quietly urgent reminder that democracy isn’t guaranteed, it’s maintained.

This Month’s Nudge

Soft Fascination: Water, Light & Other Soft Things

Coined by environmental psychologists Rachel and Stephen Kaplan, soft fascination refers to the gentle, effortless attention we give to calming, natural stimuli—think the rustle of leaves, the drift of clouds, the glint of water. Unlike the high-intensity focus our workdays demand, soft fascination doesn’t deplete us, it restores us.

This idea comes from attention restoration theory, which suggests that certain kinds of environments—especially those with elements of nature—help our overstimulated minds recover. Time spent in these settings improves memory, reduces stress, enhances creativity, and helps regulate emotions.

Lately, I’ve found myself seeking moments of soft fascination. Watching the sunrise at the beach before the world wakes up. Pausing on a night walk to sit by the water. I always return to water when I need to feel recalibrated.

So this month, consider what your version might look like—the long way home, lunch in the park, a slow hike.

Soft fascination asks nothing of you. It isn’t a goal—it’s a gentle invitation to return to your humanness by simply being with nature, not mastering it.

Creative Curiosities

Three Eyes on Mexico: Iturbide & the Álvarez Bravos

I was meant to take a quick trip to Mexico this month (where I grew up) but plans shifted. So instead, I found myself re-immersing in the photography of Graciela Iturbide and the married duo Manuel and Lola Álvarez Bravo. Their images aren’t loud, but they stay with you. They move through surrealism, ritual, everyday life, and grief with the kind of emotional clarity that doesn’t announce itself—but lands, truthfully.

Iturbide was mentored by Manuel, and you can feel the echoes in their work—but hers leans deeper into the feminine, the sacred, the dreamlike. (Fun fact: I have a tattoo of a phrase Manuel once told Graciela). Manuel’s compositions are mythic. Lola’s are quietly defiant. Together, the three of them mapped a visual language for Mexico that resists being flattened into cliché or poverty, nostalgia or color.

What makes their work especially resonant is that it offers a counterpoint to the many foreign lenses that have long tried to “capture” Mexico, often with a fetishizing or othering gaze. These three saw the country from within. They didn’t try to explain it. They revealed it, on its own terms, through its shadows, symbols, and silences.

If you're in a visual rut—or just want to see the world through another aperture—take a slow scroll through their work.

Graciela Iturbide’s portfolio →
Manuel Álvarez Bravo archive →
Lola Álvarez Bravo retrospective →

Morsel of Inspiration

“There are a hundred paths through the world that are easier than loving. But, who wants easier?” — Mary Oliver

There’s something quietly radical in choosing what’s not easy. Whether it’s opting in when the form lets you drift past, sitting with stillness when distraction is easier, or showing up in love when it asks everything of you.

This line from Mary Oliver isn’t a reprimand; it’s a wink, a dare. A reminder that the harder path is often the one that awakens us, not just to others, but to ourselves.

Here’s to choosing the thing that asks more of us—and offers more back.

Until next time, stay wide.

This past week was World Happiness Day, and like clockwork, the usual headline carousel spun up:
✨ Finland is the happiest country on Earth—for the 7th year in a row!
😟 The U.S. drops to 23rd place, its lowest ranking ever.
🧠 5 things Scandinavians do differently

But beneath these catchy, clickable headlines is a methodology that’s... deeply flawed. My friend Marc sent me an excellent deep dive into this by Yascha Mounk, which is what inspired the following commentary.

For those not in the know, The World Happiness Report, published annually by the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, bases its rankings on responses to a single question known as the Cantril Ladder:

“Imagine a ladder from 0 to 10, where 10 is the best possible life for you, and 0 is the worst. What step are you on right now?”

That’s it. That’s the whole measure.

On the surface, it might seem like enough, but this question doesn’t ask about emotional well-being, joy, community, creativity, meaning, or connection. It asks for a self-evaluation of one's place in life, and—unsurprisingly—people tend to answer in terms of status, wealth, and success. In fact, a 2021 UK study found that the most common interpretations of the question included references to income, housing, and job security. It’s a satisfaction survey, not a happiness one.

It is worth nothing that countries like Denmark and Sweden, celebrated for their high scores, also have among the highest antidepressant usage and suicide rates in Europe. The disconnect is glaring.

Even Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman (who coined the distinction between the “experiencing self” and the “remembering self”) cautioned against confusing moment-to-moment emotional well-being with retrospective life evaluations. We’re not great narrators of our own experience.

As Yascha points out, Economists Danny Blanchflower and Alex Bryson took this further. In a landmark study, they analyzed global data from multiple well-being surveys—not just life satisfaction, but positive affect (joy, laughter, rest, smiling) and negative affect (sadness, worry, pain, anger). The results? A very different map of global happiness.

Finland fell to 51st place.
Thailand, Panama, and Japan soared past it.
And many U.S. states—Hawaii, the Dakotas, Minnesota—ranked as happier than any nation on Earth.

So… what is happiness? And why are we so eager to outsource its definition to charts and reports?

Psychologist Barbara Fredrickson, known for her Broaden-and-Build theory, defines positive emotions as the building blocks of resilience and connection. Her research shows that micro-moments of joy, gratitude, and love—not major life events—sustain long-term well-being. Similarly, Sonja Lyubomirsky's work finds that only 10% of happiness is driven by circumstances like income or geography. The rest? Intentional activities and mindset.

Yet, our public narratives chase the Big Fix: the perfect country, the secret habit, the one hack.

But maybe happiness isn’t a ladder. Maybe it’s a field. A rhythm. A series of thresholds and returns. Maybe it’s not something to measure, but something to notice.

So instead of asking “Which country is happiest?”
We might ask:
🌱 Where did I feel most alive this week?
🎶 What moment made me laugh without trying?
🫂 Whom am I most authentic and at peace around?

These aren’t questions made for rankings or external comparison. They’re questions with roots—meant to steady us, not score us.

Listenin’ & Readin’

Content that has provoked my thoughts recently.

🎧 The Best Idea Yet
Episode: Goldfish Crackers: The Most Romantic Snack
A delightfully unexpected deep dive into how Goldfish Crackers—yes, really—became a symbol of comfort, care, and quiet devotion. At the heart of the story is Margaret Rudkin, one of the most fascinating and least well-known female entrepreneurs in U.S. history, who turned a homemade remedy for her son into the powerhouse that became Pepperidge Farm. A tender, crunchy listen about love, legacy, and cheddar.

🎧 Honestly with Bari Weiss
Episode: Meet Sarah Wynn-Williams, Facebook’s Highest Ranking Defector
After 13 years at Meta, Sarah Wynn-Williams walked away—and now she’s speaking out. This episode is a rare, behind-the-scenes look at the inner culture of Big Tech and how the architecture of social media platforms is rewiring society. Sarah offers an unusually calm, thoughtful critique of the systems she helped build, and it’s not the standard whistleblower drama. It’s more nuanced, more human. This is one of her first interviews since the release of her new book, so it feels very much like a starting point—but for anyone interested in tech, influence, and power, the book is a must.

🎧 The Rich Roll Podcast
Episode: The Mindful Body: Harvard’s Dr. Ellen Langer on the Power of Mindfulness, How Thoughts Can Control Health, & Using Perspective to Lower Stress
Dr. Ellen Langer, Harvard's first tenured female psychology professor and a pioneering researcher on the mind-body connection, joins Rich Roll to discuss her latest book, The Mindful Body. In this insightful conversation, Dr. Langer explores how our thoughts and perceptions can significantly influence our health and well-being. She challenges conventional notions of mindfulness, emphasizing the profound impact of simply noticing new things. This episode offers a compelling perspective on the power of mindfulness and its potential to transform our lives.​

This Month’s Nudge

Ever walk into a room and forget why you came in? It’s not just your brain spacing out—it’s your brain doing exactly what it’s wired to do.

According to a well-cited study by researchers at the University of Notre Dame (and broken down beautifully in this BBC article), passing through a doorway creates an “event boundary” in the mind. Your hippocampus and prefrontal cortex—parts of the brain responsible for memory and cognitive control—essentially mark the moment as a clean break. It’s as if your mind drops the previous tab and opens a new one.

Doorways, it turns out, don’t just separate rooms. They separate moments.
They reprogram consciousness.

Ancient cultures took this seriously. Japanese torii gates, Egyptian pylons, Gothic cathedral archways—they weren’t just decorative flourishes. They were symbolic and somatic thresholds. To cross them was to shift states: from profane to sacred, mundane to mythic. These structures weren’t just architecture—they were technologies of transformation.

Modern neuroscience backs this up. Thresholds play with attention and perception. They affect the autonomic nervous system. We orient ourselves differently on the other side. (In trauma therapy and somatic practices, even a figurative threshold—like “leaving the past behind”—can regulate or rewire response patterns.)

Which begs the question: what doorways are we walking through, and are we doing it intentionally?

A few prompts to linger on:

• What entrance has most powerfully affected you?

• Can you remember a moment when crossing a literal or symbolic threshold changed how you felt or saw the world?

• How might you build micro-thresholds into your home, your rituals, your events?

This month, don’t just walk through your doorways—cross them with intention. Let each threshold become a moment of quiet ceremony. A reset. A reclamation.

Morsel of Inspiration

On Courage, by David Whyte

David Whyte has a way of naming the invisible. His reflection on courage is one of those rare pieces that seems to meet you exactly where you are—especially in seasons of quiet upheaval, subtle reorientation, or simply the everyday work of staying open.

He writes:

“Courage is what love looks like when tested by the simple everyday necessities of being alive.”

It’s not always bold or dramatic. Often, courage feels like confusion on the inside—like being pulled in a direction you can’t yet name.

“Only slowly do we learn what we really care about, and allow our outer life to be realigned in that gravitational pull... On the inside we come to know who and what and how we love and what we can do to deepen that love; only from the outside and only by looking back, does it look like courage.”

This piece is one to sit with. Let it meet you wherever you are right now.

🔗 Read the full reflection →

Places to Be

Here’s where I’ll be speaking and moderating this spring:

• Smart City Expo USA (April): Building smarter, more sustainable cities and the communities we live in. Learn more.

• Summit Detroit (June): Bringung together global leaders, innovators, and artists for a series of talks, performances, and workshops, celebrating reinvention and creativity. Learn more.

If you’re attending, let me know—I’d love to connect in person!

Until next time, stay wide.

This Month’s Nudge

On a note of meaning-making, here’s your reminder to send someone snail mail. Whether it’s a postcard or a handwritten note, a little pen and paper can go a long way. There’s something timeless and thoughtful about putting words on the page and sending a small surprise to brighten someone’s day.

Pro tip: Support a local stationery store or explore small letterpress and print shops. Here are some great options to get you started:

• Kwotations – Playful, thoughtful stationery with hand-drawn designs.

• People I’ve Loved – Whimsical, heartfelt cards that feel like a warm hug.

• Little Postage House – Vintage postage stamps and beautiful stationery for the snail mail enthusiast.

• Wishbone Letterpress – Quirky, creative cards with a letterpress charm.

• Pomegranate Press – Unique, artful designs perfect for every occasion.

• Letterpress PDX – Modern letterpress stationery with a Portland flair.

Now, grab a pen and send a little joy into the world.

Listenin’ & Readin’

Content that has provoked my thoughts recently.

Spotlight: The American Dream, Stuck in Place

For a country built on movement—westward expansion, great migrations, and the restless pursuit of opportunity—America has quietly stopped moving. Today, people change jobs less, start fewer businesses, and relocate at historically low rates. But why?

In The Atlantic’s latest issue, Yoni Appelbaum explores this paradox in How Progressives Froze the American Dream. His argument is provocative: well-intentioned, preservation-focused policies—especially zoning laws championed by progressive elites—have unintentionally locked many Americans out of upward mobility. By making housing scarce and expensive, these policies have turned thriving cities into fortresses, limiting who can afford to chase opportunity.

The piece challenges us to rethink the balance between stability and dynamism, between protecting what we love about our communities and making space for those who dream of joining them. If you’re interested in how place shapes prosperity—and how we might get unstuck—this is a must-read.

📖 Read the full article here

Spotlight: The U.S. Military's Recruiting Crisis

The ranks of the American armed forces are depleted. Is the problem the military or the country? In The New Yorker, Dexter Filkins delves into this pressing issue in The U.S. Military's Recruiting Crisis.

Filkins examines the multifaceted challenges contributing to the military's recruitment shortfall, including societal shifts, policy decisions, and changing perceptions of military service. His in-depth reporting sheds light on how these factors intertwine, raising critical questions about the future of the U.S. armed forces and national security.

For those interested in understanding the complexities behind the military's recruitment challenges and what it means for the country's defense, this article offers a comprehensive analysis.

📖 Read the full article here

Creative Curiosities: When Architects Design Boats

Architects have long been captivated by the challenge of designing for the open seas. The transition from static, gravity-bound structures to dynamic, buoyant vessels is more than a technical shift—it’s a shift in mindset. Buildings are rooted in place, providing stability in a world of flux. Boats, however, embrace movement, responding to the wind, water, and elements with constant adaptation. This shift from permanence to fluidity demands a different way of thinking: how do you create a space that not only protects but also moves with its environment?

What can the rest of us learn from architects who trade the stability of land for the ever-changing nature of water? The translation of skills from buildings to boats is a reminder that expertise, when paired with curiosity, can cross domains in unexpected ways. It suggests that even the most grounded disciplines can—and perhaps should—be challenged by environments that demand constant motion. Just as a boat must flex with the waves and respond to the elements, so too must we learn to navigate change with intention and grace. This interplay between structure and impermanence, between control and surrender, holds lessons far beyond design—lessons about life, adaptation, and the beauty of embracing the unknown.

This fascination with designing for water has led some of the most renowned architects to take on the challenge of naval design, crafting vessels that are as conceptually bold as they are technically sophisticated. From Le Corbusier’s pragmatic transformation of a barge into a floating shelter to Frank Gehry’s sculptural sailing yacht, the architectural imagination, when set adrift, creates something wholly unique.

Le Corbusier’s Louise-Catherine

In 1929, modernist master Le Corbusier took to the water, transforming a concrete barge into a floating shelter named Louise-Catherine. Moored along the Seine in Paris, this innovative project was commissioned by the Salvation Army to house the homeless during harsh winters. Corbusier applied his signature minimalist aesthetic and modular efficiency to the vessel, adapting land-based architectural principles to the constraints and possibilities of a marine environment.

Yet water, ever indifferent to permanence, had its final say. In February 2018, the Louise-Catherine sank due to severe flooding—an ironic but fitting end to an experiment in mobile habitation. Though the vessel is gone, the project remains a compelling example of architecture’s ability to reshape not just space, but also societal structures.

Frank Gehry’s Foggy

Frank Gehry, known for his undulating titanium-clad buildings, brought his signature playfulness to yacht design with Foggy, a 74-foot sailing yacht. Designed as a passion project in collaboration with experienced shipbuilders, Foggy incorporates Gehry’s love of organic, fluid forms—manifesting in a perforated wooden latticework that scatters light like waves filtering through the ocean surface.

Unlike his deconstructivist buildings, which defy traditional constraints but remain immobile, Foggy must function within the physics of sailing. Here, Gehry had to balance artistic expression with the rigorous demands of aerodynamics and hydrodynamics. The result? A vessel that is both sculptural and seaworthy—a floating testament to the intersection of engineering and aesthetic ambition.

Zaha Hadid’s Unique Circle Yachts

The late Zaha Hadid extended her architectural prowess to the seas with the Unique Circle Yachts, a collaboration with German shipyard Blohm+Voss. Hadid’s designs, always fluid and organic, found a natural home in the world of yacht design. The concept series features sinuous, interconnected forms reminiscent of natural marine structures, rejecting the rigid symmetry of traditional yachts.

Hadid’s work challenges the idea that a boat must look like a boat. Instead, her vessels dissolve the distinction between land and sea, echoing the flow of water itself. More sculpture than ship, her designs stretch the limits of what marine architecture can be.

Greg Lynn’s AL+

Architect Greg Lynn, known for his pioneering work in digital design, approached naval architecture with the same computational precision that defines his buildings. His project AL+ is a high-performance sailing vessel that employs advanced digital fabrication techniques. Built with lightweight aluminum and optimized for speed, the yacht reflects the increasing role of computation in both architecture and shipbuilding.

Lynn’s work highlights a key lesson of cross-disciplinary innovation: the tools and techniques developed for one domain can lead to breakthroughs in another. Just as digital modeling reshaped architecture, it now allows for the design of lighter, faster, and more efficient vessels—pushing both fields forward.

The Fluidity of Design—and Life

Each of these examples illustrates how architects, when untethered from land, must rethink their craft. A boat is not just a floating building; it is a response to an entirely different set of forces—ones that demand adaptability, precision, and an acceptance of movement.

This translation of architectural skills into naval design carries lessons for all of us. It’s an exercise in flexibility—learning to let go of rigid structures and embrace dynamic forces. It’s about precision, as the margin for error at sea is far slimmer than on land. And perhaps most profoundly, it’s a meditation on resilience. A well-designed boat doesn’t resist the waves; it rides them. In a world that often feels uncertain, we, too, might benefit from designing our lives with a little more buoyancy.

For a deeper dive into this topic, watch ArchDaily’s When Architects Design Boats:
Watch Here

Morsel of Inspiration

“We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.” - Anaïs Nin

Until next time, stay wide.

As a sophomore, I took a class with Tal Ben Shahar on the Psychology of Happiness that was, to date, the largest lecture in Harvard College history. I was a psychology double major, but the reality is that many of us were there because we were stretched, stressed, and unsure of how to build and nurture our own "happiness."

One of the most seemingly basic concepts we learned about was the research behind gratitude, now much more popularized. As we now know, studies have shown that practicing gratitude can significantly improve mental health, increase happiness, and even enhance physical health. For instance, this article from the Greater Good Science Center at Berkeley explains how gratitude rewires the brain for positivity and resilience, detailing how it activates regions of the brain associated with dopamine release. Similarly, this recent article from Harvard Health underscores gratitude’s long-term benefits, linking it to improved relationships, better health, and even increased longevity.

Always a fan of taking it up a notch and using psychology on myself in equal measure, I started wondering if I could hack this practice and expand it. Most of us are taught to implement daily gratitude practices as a bookend of the day—like keeping a journal or tally of our main takeaways—but I opted for a tweaked approach: an ongoing, evolving list. I carry a Moleskine journal with me at all times, and whenever something happens that I’m grateful for—no matter how insignificant—I jot it down. Over the course of the day, each page becomes a mosaic of that day’s smallest joys—a stranger’s unexpected joke, the sunlight catching my window just right, a thoughtful text from my godmother—blended in with some of the most remarkable moments of grace or fulfillment.

There’s something uniquely equalizing about how both the most mundane moments and the most transformative experiences are distilled into a daily catalog of bullet points, side by side, page after page, year after year. But what this does is more than just capture moments of gratitude; it activates the Reticular Activating System (RAS) in my brain. This part of the brain filters information and focuses our attention. By setting “things I feel grateful for” as the query, my brain constantly scans for data to fulfill that input. Is this something I’m grateful for? Is that? What about this other thing? The result is that I catch and capture fleeting moments, interactions, and decisions I would otherwise miss—and certainly not remember if I were narrowing down a Top Five at the end of the day.

Gratitude isn’t about erasing the challenges of life and this doesn’t mean that bad moments don’t happen—they do. But by cognitively focusing on the good ones, we can train our minds to build recognition patterns for them, and let that recognition transform our days. For me, it has been a small practice with profound effects, and I can’t recommend it enough.

This Month’s Nudge

When you head to your next dinner or gathering, take a moment to prepare for it. Ask yourself: What would make this experience meaningful to me? What about for others? Brainstorm a few topics or questions to contribute to the conversation. Don’t assume business as usual—put in a little effort to create a memory or spark meaningful discussions.

Having noticed a tendency for conversations to stay superficial or monotonous, some of my friend groups have started sharing topics—and even reading materials—in advance. While these aren’t the sole focus of the evening, they create opportunities for deeper conversations that go beyond the usual updates. Over time, this practice has led to healthy debates, shared learning, profound discussions, and, most importantly, built muscle around intentionality. Especially for gatherings representing diverse life stages—varying ages, children/no children, and so on—this practice has become a way to thoughtfully build common spaces of meaning as we undergo shifts and experiences that are not symmetric across the group.

I’ve also woven this idea into Sunday lunches with my family. It’s easy to let routine and familiarity trap us in the same cycles of conversation, so I introduced ways to break that inertia and spark new experiences together. Two summers ago, we spent every Sunday perfecting homemade tortillas and experimenting with different taco recipes. Every October, we prepare for an annual Oktoberfest lunch—an invented tradition, given none of us are German. Sometimes, I bring questions to explore—about our family history, philosophy or history, current events, or something I’ve been reading. These prompts have taken us down unexpected rabbit holes, creating moments of discovery and newness with the two people I thought I knew best.

When we show up to gatherings with some intentionality, we turn the ordinary into something extraordinary, and we introduce fresh energy into the room. A thoughtful question, a new tradition, or even just the intention to engage differently can transform the way we connect, whether it’s with friends, family, or strangers. It’s not about grand plans, but rather being willing to throw something at the room and see how it is volleyed back, leaving us all a little more seen, enriched, and inspired.

Listenin’ & Readin’

Content that has provoked my thoughts recently.

Books:

1. Consolations II by David Whyte: This follow-up to the much-loved first volume continues exploring life’s profound truths through poetic and reflective essays. Each entry is a "definition" of a word or concept, offering a lens of understanding that has resonated deeply with readers—a book to cherish, revisit, and gift.

2. Everyone Who is Gone is Here by Jonathan Blitzer: A deeply researched and empathetic narrative about migration and displacement, weaving together the resilience and challenges faced by individuals seeking a new life. This book illuminates the human stories that often remain untold.

3. The Power of Moments: Written by Chip and Dan Heath, this book delves into the art, science, and business of creating extraordinary experiences. By focusing on the defining moments that bring meaning and transformation, it inspires readers to elevate the ordinary into the unforgettable, whether in their homes or for their companies.

Articles:
In the early days of a new presidential chapter in the U.S., foreign policy is once again front and center. Headlines are swirling with speculation and claims about what the nation’s role on the global stage will be over the next four years. As I listened to this podcast episode about Andrew Jackson’s influence on American populism and its enduring impact on U.S. foreign policy, it prompted me to take a step back—not just to reflect on the present moment, but to think about the historical frameworks that have shaped these conversations for over a century.

American foreign policy, though often debated in practical terms, is deeply rooted in four enduring theoretical schools of thought: Hamiltonian, Wilsonian, Jeffersonian, and Jacksonian. First outlined by Walter Russell Mead, these frameworks offer distinct perspectives on how America defines its global role. Hamiltonians emphasize economic leadership and trade; Wilsonians champion moral internationalism and democratic ideals; Jeffersonians advocate for safeguarding liberty at home by limiting entanglements abroad; and Jacksonians embrace a populist, defense-oriented nationalism.

These schools are more than abstract theories—they are the lenses through which American leaders, consciously or not, approach diplomacy and global engagement. Understanding these traditions doesn’t just deepen our historical knowledge—it helps illuminate the ideological debates shaping our present. For further reading, check out the School of Thought That Influenced American Foreign Policy by Kerem Karacay and Walter Russell Mead’s article, The Return of Hamiltonian Statecraft.

Creative Curiosities

Photography has long played a critical role in how we process and understand the world around us, including at its worst, the realities of war. By freezing moments of humanity, loss, and resilience, it allows us to grapple with conflict in ways that words alone cannot. While there are many well-known war correspondents, I want to pause and highlight women photographers—whose contributions to this field, though often less recognized, are no less profound. Wartime photography is arguably one of the most grueling and demanding forms of storytelling, requiring not only technical skill but immense courage and emotional fortitude. These women, through their lenses, have offered us unparalleled insights into the human condition during times of chaos and crisis.

Lindsay Adario is probably the most notable contemporary wartime photographer. Her work has defined how we perceive many of today’s conflicts, including the war in Ukraine. Even if you don't recognize her name, I guarantee you've seen her photos and, through her lens, have gained a visceral sense of the human cost of wars being waged around the globe. Learn more about her work on her official website and through her photography for The New York Times.

So with that, I share a retrospective on some of the groundbreaking photographers who have inspired me most:

• Lee Miller: Lee Miller’s work as a photographer during World War II was groundbreaking. By publishing in Vogue, she brought the realities of war into homes, particularly to ordinary people who had never encountered such raw imagery. It represented a huge departure for Vogue and it swayed public sentiment and investment in the war effort. Her famous self-portrait in Hitler’s bathtub is iconic—not just for its shocking juxtaposition of domesticity and horror, but for its bold statement about the conquering of evil and the resilience of humanity. Learn more about her work here. There’s a recent movie about her life that I highly recommend for anyone intrigued by her daring spirit, watch the trailer here.

• Margaret Bourke-White: Margaret Bourke-White’s career was full of firsts—she was the first foreign photographer allowed to capture images in the Soviet Union, she was the first female staff photographer for LIFE magazine and made its first cover photo, and she was the first woman allowed to work in combat zones in World War II. Her documentation of resilience and human strength during turbulent times remains unparalleled, and she set a gold standard for photojournalism that is still revered today. Fun fact: she also had a tumultuous marriage to Ernest Hemingway, which adds another layer of intrigue to her remarkable life. Explore her archive here.

• Gerda Taro: Gerda Taro, often overshadowed by her more famous partner Robert Capa, was a pioneering wartime photographer in her own right. Her coverage of the Spanish Civil War is raw, emotive, and deeply personal. She had a fearless approach to documenting conflict, and her tragic death on the front lines at just 26 underscores the profound risks she took to reveal the truth through her lens. Taro’s work remains a testament to her courage and artistic vision. Discover her contributions here.

These women were rebellious, talented, and certainly unconventional. Their work reminds us that storytelling is not always a choice—it’s often a calling. When we explore the breadth of voices and perspectives, we uncover a much richer, more textured tapestry of history and humanity. Their courage behind the lens challenges us to look beyond the surface and appreciate the profound impact of those who risk everything to document the truth.

Things I am Loving

This section was subscriber-requested (somewhat to my surprise), so here is a test run. It features current favorites—products, services, and random tchotchkes that I genuinely love, find useful, and think you’ll enjoy too.

• For your kitchen: If you've ever seen me cooking, you know I love the liberal use of fresh herbs. Given countless failed attempts to grow dill and basil, I have resorted to finding ways of keeping my store-bought herbs alive for as long as possible. Enter: herb savers. There are different ones on the market (this is mine), but the concept is the same: you cut a little off the stems (as you would when putting flowers in a vase), add water at the bottom, and set them upright in your fridge. They will last for weeks instead of days. Nobody needs sad cilantro.

  
  While on the topic of storage, the only thing I use more liberally than herbs is garlic. Thus, every grandmotherly bone in my body has been stressed to learn that most of us store garlic incorrectly. To properly store garlic, keep whole, unpeeled garlic bulbs in a cool, dry, dark place with air circulation — not airtight or in the refrigerator. I keep mine on the counter in a handy dandy (drumroll, please) garlic keeper.

• Seasonally relevant: My formerly New England self owns more than her per capita allotment of sweaters, so trust me when I say I have tried countless fabric shavers and depillers on the market. Let me take a step back: folks, de-pill your sweaters; we can all see the pilling and it is not the look you’re going for. That said, against all odds, this $9 tool has beaten out every electronic, expensive gadget I have tried for this purpose over the past two decades. Repeat after me: cozy, not scruffy.

• For your wellbeing: Not sure if this is confirmation bias, but hair (and hair issues) have been coming up often recently. I'm not a dermatologist, but here's what has worked for me:

  1. The single step that has most changed the quality of my hair in recent years has been adding a Jolie filter to my showerhead.

  2. I've used Prose personalized shampoo for years. I adjust the formula with the seasons, changes in hair texture, travel, etc. It’s over the top, but worth it.

  3. If you’re active and spend a lot of time in the water, like I do, protecting your hair from the sun is not an old wife's tale. Cover it up and use protective products, like this one (think of it like sunscreen for your hair).

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Morsel of Inspiration

“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something is worth doing no matter how it turns out.” — Václav Havel

As the first month of 2025 starts to wind down, I hope you find moments to pause, connect, and savor each day as it happens. Choose joy, chase love, and dance in the kitchen.

Until next time, stay wide.