Nine weeks into this series, you know a lot more about what a good conversation asks of you. You know to get curious, to remember that the person across from you may see something you don't, to listen long enough to understand, and to catch yourself when you start defending. And then someone says one [...]

My son was thirteen when I finally said something I had apparently been saving up for a while. People were always telling me what a wonderful kid he was. Teachers loved him. Coaches loved him. Other parents would tell me how polite he was, how thoughtful, how helpful. I heard some version of What a [...]

I have a policy I never remember making. It shows up when someone says something and I have a real response, but before I can give it another thought comes in: What good would it do? Usually that is enough to stop me. I say something easier instead, or ask a safer question, or let the subject [...]

This essay came to life this past Friday evening. I was driving, half-listening to music, when the Buffalo Springfield song came on the radio. It stopped me. The nostalgia hit hard, the good parts of it and the harder parts too, and I felt like I had to write down what I was feeling. [...]

Emerging Findings on Human Flourishing: A Document Born from a Weekly Roundtable For nearly two years, a small group of us gathered every week for the Heroic Arizona Roundtable. We shared our favorite Plus 1's. We reported our Hero Bar wins and losses. We showed up for each other, week after week, in a [...]

You learn something about your own country by being outside it during an election. Everyone has an opinion about America. People who will never live there, can't vote there, may not even particularly like the place, follow an American presidential race with astonishing attention. They know the candidates. They know the scandals. They know which [...]

Someone in my house just asked me what's for dinner. I want you to understand the conditions under which this crime occurred. I am eleven weeks from launching an organization. I am at my desk, which everyone can see, doing something on a screen, which everyone can see, wearing the face of a woman solving [...]

My mother and I have disagreed about the shoes I bought my kids. Whether those kids should have been made to drink milk at every meal (they were not, and every one of them has reached adulthood with an intact skeleton). How to raise children generally, what to spend money on, what counts as taking [...]

A closer look at why extraordinary wealth is easier to understand in some hands than in others Imagine we are standing together a little over two hundred years ago. Look around. Nearly everyone we see is poor by any modern measure, and global life expectancy at birth is under thirty years, a number driven [...]

There's a young guy in my house running a cable line, and I'm doing the thing I'm terrible at, which is trying to talk to him while he works. Small talk and I have never gotten along; I feel about it the way other people feel about public speaking. But he's easy — twenty-four, maybe, [...]