As the USA approaches its 250th birthday, please pause to consider these four often-overlooked words.
Who’s Singing in Your Head Right Now?
Four insights into consciousness from Michael Pollan’s "A World Appears."
What to Do When Life Shows Up Uninvited
Take a moment to appreciate the pinafores and listen to the lollygags.
Why Does Rage Bait Work?
No one wants to be mad all the time. So why does social media constantly tempt us with rage bait? And why do we consistently bite?
The Struggle to Write Is the Struggle to Think
Ask most people to define “writing,” and they’ll tell you it’s the process of putting words down on paper, communicating what you already know. In reality, writing is often how you discover what you don’t know—and so how you learn to think better.
Why Do Humans Need to Keep Writing?
All humans have lived experiences that we relate to one another with words: We live truths worth telling. Consider the example of a 12-year-old boy, singing at a nursing home in December 1983.
Will AI Break the Spell of TV?
The implicit promise of TV has always been something like this: I will show you the world beyond. My screen will function as a window onto distant events and places. AI-generated video obliterates this promise--and could change how we think about the scenes on our screens.
Write It Down
The things you write down, using your own words, begin to become the meaning you create for yourself, if for no other reason than because you wrote them down. And creating meaning is not a task any of us can afford to outsource.
How Do You Stay Hopeful?
The philosopher Ernst Bloch argued that hope is woven into the fabric of reality. Here’s a brief look at his big ideas, plus prompts to get you thinking and writing (hopefully).
I Used to Be ChatGPT
In the early 2000s, my job was to find and share answers to hard questions fast. Here’s what that experience taught me about how humans know, why we need to keep thinking together, and when we’re better than any artificial intelligence.
