Somewhere between the slow, animated pieces of a childhood game and the rating number that now scores my every move, I started wondering what, exactly, the chess board is measuring in me

We measure our carbon footprint. But what about the footprint we leave in people?

There is a man who walks my street most mornings. He only ever collides with what doesn't belong on the pavement. Today, someone walked into him.

Agency. Impact. Take control. Grab the reins. The vocabulary insists we don't have enough power. What if the problem is the opposite — that we have too much, real or imagined, and the harder work is to stop, look, and accept how small most of our marks turn out to be?

We've built an entire vocabulary for approaching certainty. But doubt gets no such courtesy.

Structure enables attention, but can become its prison. When does a scaffold become a cage? When does understanding arrive too early? An interlude on the suspended moment before interpretation forecloses what hasn’t yet revealed itself.

Every night we surrender consciousness and enter a state dangerously close to the one we fear most. Dreams might be what keeps our search for meaning alive when we're in no condition to pursue it. An essay on madness, rationality, and what lightning can't say to thunder.

A follow-up to “relational sustainability”

The comedy of public intellectuals and corporate facilitators.

I fear I’m becoming an editor of my own ideas rather than their author. A reflection on what we cede when we let machines carry the weight of articulation — and whether the distance they offer brings us closer to anything worth reaching.

The easy part of writing a book is writing it. A confession about humility, envy, and the time that no productivity strategy can reclaim.

When a conversation about coherence becomes an exercise in it.

Fifteen thinkers on what makes a good life in a more-than-human world. A soaked bathroom floor, the next morning, with another answer.