More than once over the past handful of years I’ve adhered to a contractual rule that my landlord didn’t realize existed. It’s almost always a quibbling, silly little line-item of no interest or importance to anyone, included in the boilerplate…
One of my superpowers is figuring out how to do something big and cumbersome and specific, breaking it up into smaller (but still incredibly boring and exhausting) pieces, and then—importantly—settling in to just finish the thing. Imagine being good at…
The news can be stressful, anxiety-inducing, tribalism-reinforcing, and littered with misleading, misinformed, heavily biased takes. There are things we can do to make our news-consumption habits more productive, including (for instance) avoiding most TV news, avoiding editorial/opinion content, and sticking…
There’s a tension between sharing enough of oneself to convey complete, round narratives, and sharing too much: stepping over the line into something uncomfortably open, unnecessarily detailed, or embellished till it’s more icing than cake. It’s tempting to aim for…
I don’t particularly enjoy the process of making a podcast: there are elements of it I find fulfilling and this process allows me to produce things I want to see in the world, while also contributing to my livelihood. But…
For about a decade-and-a-half, beginning just after the arrival of smartphones in everyone’s pockets and the subsequent deployment of social media platforms on those devices, we’ve benefitted and suffered from shared, digital social spaces. As with most things, the fruits…
Over the years, I’ve often waxed poetic about my love for slow-paced, long-term travel, but I’m also a big fan of what I’ve come to think of as “mini-vacations” as both alternatives and supplements to deeper, more involved explorations of…
I tend to believe that a balanced informational diet is important. That means trying to engage with a variety of different sources, different mediums, different types of information, and making sure to include hearty helpings of concrete reality, compelling (not…
I’ve been working for myself, running a collection of publications and small businesses and “weird internet projects,” since 2009. That’s a long time ago! Smartphones were still a new thing, the world was still recovering from a global financial crisis,…
Our brains and bodies default to conserving energy. This energetic setting made a lot of sense in primordial history, as the creatures that could accumulate and save more energy tended to outperform (and thus, out-survive and out-procreate) their competition. It…