Gather Round

This coming Monday, a few of us will be discussing the book The Breakup. Join us if you feel like it:  October 26, 2026 5pm PT / 6pm MT / 7pm CT / 8pm ET Via Zoom In the great tradition of my local book club: you do not have to have done

On Working Small

A couple weeks ago, one of you spotted the phrase “compulsion to reconcile” and asked, knowingly but not unkindly, if I am still serving as a mediator.  I am. I continue to work through my local Dispute Resolution Center (DRC), and I continue to love it. Why?  1. Because it

Save the Date?

No column today: I did more than the usual amount of mediating this week, and I’m all out of reasonableness. :-) Instead, I just want to flag that a few of us will be gathering on Monday, October 26 at 5pm PT/8pm ET to talk about The Breakup. Set

The Bright Side of Imminent Destruction?

It does inspire a certain togetherness. Anyone who knows me will tell you that I am relentlessly hopeful.  I have a deep faith in the agency and ingenuity of human beings. Especially when we, the people of Earth, are pulling in the same direction, we can do extraordinary things. Remember

Three Things You’ve Told Me in No Uncertain Terms

First, some context: my subscriber base is verrry modest. There are (on Substack) exactly 246 of you. I know many of you in real life. I am related to some of you.  I write each week not to tell you—or anyone—how to think about things but instead to

What a Punk. Also: That Punk’s Not Wrong

My office looks like I’m chasing a serial killer: sticky notes abound, some so old they’re not sticky anymore. Many are secured with Scotch tape, in clusters on a large whiteboard and in technicolor vines, up and down the sides of my computer monitors. All that’s missing

Alternative Fuel

This week did not lend itself to writing. Here instead is a rainbow-powered ferry.

Power Struggles Are Uncomfortable—and Necessary

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

Walk With Me?

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

You Don’t Have to Work with Your Hands to Be Authentic

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

Grace Note

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

Proof of Life

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

Harrumph!

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

The Fight for a Good Death

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

Flash Forward

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,

"Onnabrite"

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

It's *Our* Party

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

Anger Is Exhausting

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

I'm Pro Trillionaire

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

"I Got You an Elegant Spoon!"

Our son, Peter, took his time learning to walk. He was a full 18 months old before he was willing to exchange his scoots and crawls for the life of a biped. But man that kid could talk.  At daycare one time, after he inserted himself into a conversation the

BYOD: Bring Your Own Doubts

I've re-started the Zooms, but 1:1. I realized I wanted more conversations—not more meetings. *** At this very moment, some of my favorite people in the world are converging on Cambridge, Massachusetts. Harvard’s Class of 1991—my class—is gathering for our 35th reunion. At

I Thought A Lot About Encyclicals This Week

I think responding to the fastest-moving technology of all time with a 42,300-word treatise titled in Latin is objectively funny. So I decided to do some research on Pope Leo XIV’s AI encyclical. 1. Did Pope Leo actually write it? It sounds like the idea for

Allow Me a Reframe?

A few weeks ago, the writer Tim Urban posed this thought experiment: Much of the internet dropped what they were doing (i.e. reading the internet) to weigh in—and to fight. Here in the U.S., the red-blue coding helped turn the discussion partisan, instantly: those who said

One Thing I Really Hoped Might Happen This Week

I keep thinking of Jimmy Lai, who was born in China and became a billionaire in Hong Kong.  Lai’s well-off family was decimated after the Communist takeover in 1949. Legend has it that he was working as a child porter at a train station when a visitor from