This week’s post came out early, so this message is just to confirm that we’re on for our monthly Zoom this coming Monday, July 7th at 5pm PT / 8pm ET. I’ve now had the giddy experience of removing trolls in real time, so I’m no longer
A couple summers ago, my husband and I “did RAGBRAI”—The Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa. To kick off, you dip your back tire into the Missouri River. To finish, you dip your front tire into the Mississippi. In between, you ride 500 miles, camp for seven
Now that I’ve stepped back from running my company, I've returned to mediating—peacemaking on a miniature scale. The Dispute Resolution Center (DRC) I’m affiliated with serves my entire county and handles a wide range of cases: parenting plans and asset division for divorcing couples, but
Andy Beshear, Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, Ruben Gallego, Amy Klobuchar, Wes Moore, Chris Murphy, Gavin Newsom, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, J.B. Pritzker, Josh Shapiro, and Gretchen Whitmer: You, in alphabetical order (because it’s way too early for any other kind of ranking), are 12 people who, I suspect, can see
Is anyone else out there haunted by that Isabel Allende interview from April, where she described fleeing Pinochet’s Chile? She began: “Although things happened very quickly in Chile, we got to know the consequences slowly, because they don’t affect you personally immediately. Of course, there were people who
Is a compelling list of 'Shared Concerns' something we could actually crack? Those of you who joined my unruly Zoom on Monday know what I’m working on: drafting a short list of “universals” that could be taken into any town hall across the country—and everyone present
When I graduated from Harvard, I had a lovely boyfriend—and he wanted to travel the world with me. I’d saved up for this trip by working, in the wee hours of the morning, at a place called The Air Charter Guide. There, I used my terrible German and
For the most part, I don’t trust my childhood memories of South Africa. I think most of them aren’t memories at all, just photographs I’ve seen. In a few cases, though, there are no photos, so the images in my mind’s eye must be real memories:
“I’m a hard-core capitalist, and my son’s a socialist. We argue about this stuff all the time,” said a friend after reading my last piece. I liked the sound of that. Engaging a teenager in rigorous debate is a great reason to adopt an extreme stance, at least
If there’s a bright side to Team Democracy’s leadership vacuum, maybe it’s this: it forces each of us to decide, all alone in the dark, what we believe. Here’s where I come out: I don’t just believe in private enterprise. I love it. I love
One of my earliest jobs involved writing speeches for the CEO of a processed meats business. At the time, I knew very little about processed meats and even less about business. My routine was to panic quietly for weeks, then pull an all-nighter. There was something about an empty office
The nicest rejection I ever received came from the famed psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi—the so-called “father of flow.” In 2011, he declined to be interviewed for Work Stew with this gem: “Thanks, Kate, but I am so overwhelmed by various commitments that I can't possibly consider even something