2025 feb	when is quitting resistance, and when is it surrender?
2022 feb	"If we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known," from the final line of this op-ed. What does it mean to be known? To fully see someone, to appreciate that they can hold complexities of tenderness and pettiness and pride and love and destructive behavior, just as we see these contradictions in ourselves? To see all the way into that "mortifying" core, so much so that it starts to become indistinguishable from one's own—a soul friend? (still working on where this fits in my friendship 2x2) What could it feel like to love a friend for (not in spite of) their flaws, as society tells we should a romantic partner? What might it look like to show up for a friend, as this beautiful piece asks us, even (or especially) when they're slipping away, lost to the chaos of new cities, careers, marriage, parenthood; to unforeseen caregivership or fame or loss or change?
2021 dec	"Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer." –Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
2021 aug	"We shall not cease from exploration / and the end of all our exploring / will be to arrive where we began / and to know the place for the first time." –TS Eliot's "Little Gidding"
2021 mar	Simplifying is much harder than complicating: "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead." –Mark Twain
2021 jan	"Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom." –Victor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
2021 jan	"People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonance within our innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive." –Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth
2020 dec	A beautiful story on self-discovery through grief and what it means to live fully even while suffocated by pain, sickness, and decay. The piece's protagonist, palliative medicine pioneer BJ Miller, also recently wrote some thought-provoking stuff on defining death, especially when a pandemic forces us to confront it like never before.
2020 dec	"The bad news is you're falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is there's no ground." –Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche
2020 aug	"I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet." –Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
2020 jun	A fascinating, terrifying look at what goes wrong when modern parenting puts kids on a pedestal instead of teaching them to fail and learn for themselves (how many thousands of times can you make the same crappy dish—turkey meatloaf—for a paranoid six-year-old? How many dishes have you made even one hundred times?)
2020 jun	A thoughtful piece on travel, stillness, and the unlikely intersection of the two. Meditating on this line: "my capacity to be stirred is in direct proportion to my ability to be quiet." –Pico Iyer
2020 may	"A country is considered more civilized the more the wisdom and efficiency of its laws hinder a weak man from becoming too weak and a powerful one too powerful." –Primo Levi
2019 dec	Turn down the goddamn thermostat—for your own health and for the environment.
2019 jun	Do the people you care about love you back? An important piece on craving mediocrity amidst glamour and building community out of chaos. I liked the way she defined community as "an insurance policy against life's cruelty; a kind of immunity against loss and disappointment and rage."
2019 jun	Support from The Atlantic that I'm only slightly psycho for being chronically late to the airport. Also, the psychology of crying while flying—an interesting and very relatable take on planes as a breeding ground for heightened emotions.
2019 apr	IF THE PRODUCT IS FREE, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT
2019 feb	Two essential, eloquent, and very related pieces: the death of the humble hobby and millenial burnout, explained with all the painful truth of our generation.
2018 nov	A fascinating and sobering story of the dark side of food tourism and the less-than-intuitive dangers of the media behind it. How do we give hidden-gem food destinations the credit they deserve without opening the floodgates to food tourists who will destroy their authenticity?
2018 aug	"Beware the barrenness of a busy life." –Socrates
2018 jun	This month, we lost one of the most brilliant story tellers of all time: "If I'm an advocate for anything, it's to move. As far as you can, as much as you can. Across the ocean, or simply across the river. Walk in someone else's shoes or at least eat their food." –Anthony Bourdain
2018 may	"Nothing creates cool like scarcity." –Neil Blumenthal re: Warby Parker's 8-month waiting list back in the day, but tell me this doesn't apply to dating too
2018 feb	Note to self: "Holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die." –probably Buddha
2017 sep	A few words from the NY Times on a beautifully understated, decidedly unheroic mindset to life and fulfillment. Bonus: a few well-chosen excerpts from the masterful Middlemarch (thanks Jeff for the spirited intro during sophomore year).
2017 mar	"I wish there was a way to know you're in the good old days before you've actually left them." –Andy Bernard, The Office
2017 jan	"Success isn't owned; it's leased—and rent is due every damn day." –a Barstool podcast, loosely
2016 nov	Our democracy might be headed over a cliff... but what can cities and democracies learn from each other?
2016 mar	"In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king." –proverb channeled by the weekday-German, weekend-French A.Z.
2016 jan	To a new chapter: "The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding." –John Updike
2015 nov	This Thanksgiving, my older brother and I traded tradition for the trail and spent six glorious, offline days hiking through Torres del Paine national park, a hallmark of the magical landscapes in Chilean Patagonia. We sang John Denver harmonies while we hiked, befriended dreadlocked Australians over just-add-hot-water camping dinners, rested our smelly feet on each other to watch unforgettable full-sky sunsets at 10pm, and slept in a tiny tent each night where we downed Malbec, traded worries about the new year, and laughed about inanities until everything ached. We have no other siblings and are less than two years apart, so have been close since he left home for college a decade ago—but it was our first time traveling alone together. Once the frustration of being constantly mistaken for a couple dissolved into comedy, I began to think for the first time about how rare and special it is to spend extended one-on-one time together as adult siblings. The window of opportunity to do so is devilishly short for most—it opens, realistically, only after leaving home, and closes all too quickly when the happy reality of life partners sets in—so short that most miss out on the chance to enjoy it. We will wind up spending decades (hopefully) by the sides of those partners—but I see friends and family, years and generations ahead of me, quickly move away from brothers and sisters, get lost in their own nuclear lives, and reconnect only a few times a year (fail-proof life hack to permanently reverse this trend: kick it Cuthbert style, move in with your sibling instead of marrying, and hope to make it big as supporting characters in the next American classic). Even then, we interact from then on as families: in-laws, nephews and nieces take center stage, and we're left with little time to keep up one-on-one with the rare few who share half our DNA and the vast majority of our first, most formative decades. Do we fail to prioritize siblings come adulthood because the natural progression of the generations intentionally replaces one nuclear family with the next? Or perhaps because we drift toward, even strictly prefer, the lives we've chosen—friends, partners, cities—over the ones we were given? Who knows what the future holds, but for now I'll continue carving out time with the comfort that the special sibling bond, like a good sturdy Malbec, gets so much better with age.
2015 sep	"The only true elegance is vulnerability." –Chögyam Tgrungpa, Buddhist monk and meditation master
2015 aug	The real deal from a fellow Bay Area native who's earning her stripes out east: why does the Silicon Valley build playgrounds for its legendary tech workforce while locking up its children in pressure cookers until they "make it" to college? Amidst all the lately excessive opining about unrealistic expectations and redefining success, this article really gets at the terrifying paradox between Silicon Valley's famously free-spirited innovation and the devastatingly overworked state of its upcoming youth.
2015 may	Three cheers to four years at the best damn place of all: "Here we were taught by men and gothic towers democracy and faith and righteousness and love of unseen things that do not die." –H. E. Mierow, memorialized on McCosh Hall
2015 mar	"We tell ourselves stories in order to live... We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience." –Joan Didion
2015 mar	"If you're going to eat shit, don't nibble." –an ex-roommate, E.G.