How to make a great playlist

Thanks to Spotify, the playlist has become the most important organizing device for music. The function that used to be done by albums and radio DJs — namely, grouping songs together — now happens in the playlists we build for ourselves.

If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end

“In religion, as in war and everything else, comfort is the one thing you cannot get by looking for it. If you look for truth, you may find comfort…

How to have new conversations with familiar people

After a certain point, conversation in most relationships settles in on a consistent set of topics. For friends, it’s catching up: “How’s work? How’s your significant other? How are your parents?” For coworkers, it might be “How was your…

At Peace And In Place

Today was one of those days when the words won’t come easy. I looked for help to Wendell Berry, my favorite poet, and found this:

In a time that breaks 
in cutting pieces all around,
when men, voiceless
against thing-ridden men,
set themselves on fire, it seems
too…

Prelude

I’m trying something different this year. I’m one of those people who wants to be a writer but rarely actually writes. So for the last few years, one of my New Year’s Resolutions has been to fix that. Each time, I imagine writing beautiful, long-form essays on complex topics. They’d be rigorous and well-crafted…

Confirmation Hearings are Broken

Betsy DeVos, Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Education, sat for her Senate confirmation hearing today. I know little of the nominee, other than the two labels she’s been given most frequently: billionaire and school choice advocate. Those descriptors alone would make…

Compound Learning

It was good to take a few days off. As I was reflecting on how the project’s gone so far, I kept returning to the idea of compound learning.

Compound learning is like compound interest for life. When you persist in working on something long enough, everything you learn…

Our Outrage Bubbles

What breaks my heart about last year is how our political conversation has frayed and fractured. The currency of our national debate is now outrage. The more angry someone is and the louder their outrage, the more they are heard and the more social and political capital they accumulate. How…

How We Use Names

Dictionaries are collections of names. They collect the names of all the things we do and say to define them and standardize…