First a short story on the subject of power: My daughter Anna never liked sleep. From the moment she arrived, she resisted it with all her might. We spent Year One walking up and down the streets of Hong Kong, where she was born, and we spent her toddler years
As you all know from my calendar system, I live by certain rules. In addition to those I’ve already shared, I believe in a firm book-to-podcast ratio: at least one hour of book listening* for every three hours of podcast listening. Some of the most thoughtful people
My career in documentary filmmaking was extremely short-lived. I entered the New York offices of Globalvision on a Monday, thrilled to bits that I would be fetching coffee for people who had produced for Frontline. Before the week was out, on top of all the yelling, one of them
This week I’m staying in a Marriott across the street from Mother Emanuel, the Charleston church where nine parishioners were killed by a white supremacist on June 17, 2015. It’s hard to look at the steps without recalling the surveillance video that was shown on repeat after the
Above in green is a map of Bainbridge. Not everyone sees it at first, but give it a moment, and it’ll come into focus: the island is shaped exactly like an upright hedgehog with a backpack. My family lives on the hedgehog’s lower foot. My brother’s family
Last week I promised something lighter: Nearly 22 years ago, a bank in Hong Kong was undertaking a major renovation of a branch office in Kowloon. During the demolition process, 83 safe deposit boxes—still chock-full of customers’ valuables—were inadvertently taken to a scrapyard…and destroyed. The official
Note: this post addresses the subject of MAID (medical aid in dying). If this is not a good time for you to read about such a heavy topic, please click away. I’ll be back next week with something lighter. I mentioned last time that I’ve had a house
I know a lot of writers who can dash off a post in no time. I am not one of those writers. I need: four consecutive days of walks, one day of drafting, one day of crippling self-doubt, and one day to decide to publish anyway. Since last Friday,
It is a truth universally acknowledged that kids lie. So when my parents really needed the straight scoop from us, they looked deep into our eyes and asked: “Onnabrite?” Because I had never seen this phrase in writing, and because I had long ditched my own South African accent, I
If you have not already immersed yourself in the news of Lawrence, Kansas embracing Algeria’s World Cup team…what in the heck have you been doing??? It’s a beautiful American story that made me trust a bit more my gauzy memories of the Bicentennial, which my family experienced
I had a bit of a meltdown last week. On Wednesday, after what felt like a month-long marathon of “school’s out” events, I told the kids (a just-graduated high school senior and a high school junior) that they could not go out that night unless they had
No sunsetting, no caps. This was my philosophy back when I was designing commission plans. If you want to attract and retain the best salespeople in a free-market economy, you don’t limit their upside. Whenever someone on the team told me they wanted to make as much as