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, [...]

For several months I had a performance coach named Lori, and about halfway through an ordinary video call, she dismantled a story I had been telling for twenty years... in one sentence. I want to set the scene, because I came into that call armed. I was complaining about my husband's career, and I complained [...]

Human Flourishing is honored to announce that we are partnering with Jason Viyar to bring his forthcoming book, The Psychological Millionaire, into the world. The book began as Jason's Master of Applied Positive Psychology capstone at the University of Pennsylvania and grew from a question that has shaped much of his life: who [...]

The institutions we built to tell us the truth — science, the university, the newsroom, the public agency — are failing at their one essential job, and no conspiracy is required to explain it. The cause is money and fear, working through ordinary people, one careful silence at a time. Nobody ordered it, and nothing [...]

I'm at a party on a rooftop terrace in Bogotá, Colombia, and someone asks how many times we've moved. I've got this one. I've told it a hundred times, in a hundred different ways. I'm good at it. The number lands, and there's a little intake of breath I'd come to expect... and then the [...]

Every few months I try. A text chain. A treasured phone call. Once, a back-and-forth about where we're going next, because we still take trips together — that's the part I need you to understand before the rest of this makes sense. We've been friends for almost thirty years. Somewhere in the last few, she [...]

I want to tell you how my husband proposed, because the circumstances were absurd and I have been living off them ever since. We were talking about our parents. Specifically, about how bad our parents' marriages were and how hard it had been to grow up inside them. We were both crying by the end [...]

I pride myself on being open-minded, and I avoid conflict wherever I can. I don't go looking for an argument, and when one catches me off-guard I feel an actual jolt of panic. I'm not good at articulating myself on the spot — small talk alone can set it off. I grew up somewhere that [...]

Somewhere in most American families there is a version of the same story. A brother who stopped calling after the argument in 2020. A college friend whose texts went unanswered once the yard signs went up. A coworker you still like, still eat lunch with, and have silently agreed never to talk with about anything [...]

Part 3 of 3 A Celebration of Canada, America, and the Friendships That Outlast Everything Every year on July 1st, I raise a glass to Canada — not as a courtesy or a diplomatic gesture, but because North Bay, Ontario is one of the places in the world where my family's story lives, and because [...]