Category: current events

The Lottery of School Supplies

I’ve been feeling nostalgic lately, which is dangerous because nostalgia has a way of making absolutely ordinary things from childhood seem magical. Today I saw a kid who looked about seven or eight years old carrying a shiny new iPad, and it sent me straight back to elementary […]

A Stormy Summer

It has been a very stormy summer. I just got yet another weather alert telling me it may start raining shortly, which feels less like a forecast at this point and more like a personal threat. We’ve had the rain. The thunder. The lightning. A giant tree in […]

The Handrail Is Lonely

I’ve noticed something at train stations. Nobody uses the handrails anymore. Up the stairs. Down the stairs. Everyone is gripping their phones, their coffee, their bags, their existential dread. But the handrail? Absolutely not. I assume this is a lingering COVID-era thing. We spent two years being told […]

A summer night  A storm, and A bathtub

I’m writing this from my bathtub. Not metaphorically. Not “I need a moment to myself” bathtub. An actual, porcelain, slightly-too-cold, mid-thunderstorm, power-is-out, phone-at-17% kind of bathtub. The lights snapped off about twenty minutes ago. One dramatic flicker, then darkness like a stage cue. Outside, the sky is doing […]

The Banana Has a Schedule Now

Just when you thought we had reached peak optimization along comes a banana. In South Korea, they’re now selling something called “haru hana banana.” A neatly packaged set of bananas arranged by ripeness. One ready today. One for tomorrow. One for later. A curated banana experience. A banana […]

The Most Extreme Group Project Ever

There are moments in life when theory meets reality in a way that makes you pause and think, well, that escalated quickly. Case in point. An absolutely surreal (and deeply tragic) news story out of Argentina, where a woman taking a flying lesson suddenly found herself alone midair […]

Disposable People?

Somewhere between scanning QR codes and letting algorithms pick our personalities, something else quietly shifted. Our relationships started to feel lighter. Faster. More replaceable. Enter the overlap I can’t stop thinking about the “5-Year Stranger Theory” (which I write about yesterday) meets the digital leash. Because yes, relationships […]

Everyone Is Just Passing Through

There’s a theory floating around the internet lately that’s called the “5-Year Stranger Theory” which basically suggests that a large portion of the people in your life right now won’t be in it five years from now. I wrote about this ladt week. And it’s still on my […]