Please Schedule Joy

I have noticed something deeply suspicious about adult calendars. They are extremely full. There are meetings, deadlines, calls, errands and the mysterious category known as “follow-up.” From 9:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., the calendar looks like a highly organized game of Tetris where responsibility always wins. But if […]

The Man Who Would Not Spill the Gold

Every once in a while the news produces a story so magnificently strange that you have to pause and admire the human psyche in its natural habitat. This week’s specimen: Tommy Thompson. A 73-year-old deep-sea treasure hunter who discovered the wreck of the legendary SS Central America a […]

We Are All Witnesses Now

I saw a quote on LinkedIn the other day that stopped me mid-scroll. “I can’t believe what you say because I see what you do.” Which is a polite, professional way of saying: Sir, the math is not mathing. And it struck me how profoundly true this feels […]

The Barbie Problem

Sometimes I wish you could see my pain. Not in a dramatic Victorian-novel way. I am not fainting on a chaise lounge with a lace handkerchief. No violins are playing. Just see it. But you can’t. Because apparently I am a Barbie doll. Not the original one from […]

Are We Addicted to Sadness?

The other day I had a small, suspicious thought. What if some of us are a little bit addicted to sadness? Not the catastrophic kind.Not the kind that requires medical intervention and casseroles. I mean the specific, curated sadness many of us seem to carry around like a […]

The Birds Are Not Singing to Me

Every morningthe birds begin their meetingbefore I do. They chirp with an enthusiasmthat feels slightly unnecessaryfor 6:07 a.m. Outside my windowthey are holding some sort of conferenceabout joy. I listen. But the strange thing isI knowthey are not singing to me. They are singing to a lifehappening somewhere […]

The Galaxy That Forgot to Pack the Stars

Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope recently spotted something about 300 million light-years away that feels oddly familiar to modern humans: a galaxy that is mostly invisible, a little mysterious, and apparently made almost entirely of Dark Matter. In other words, a cosmic entity that is technically there, […]