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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]