In 2000 — when I was in the fourth grade — I read an article about how to land a dream job at Microsoft. The article followed a candidate through the travails of interviewing for Microsoft’s consulting team from the application to the phone screen to the multiple in-person interviews, and included tips from the former-candidate-turned-interviewer to prospective applicants. I didn’t even know what a dream job was but it sounded like a lot of work to get one.

That same year, my class’s fourth grade yearbook (it’s hard to believe that such a thing as a fourth grade yearbook even exists) posed one question that accompanied everyone’s headshots: ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ …

In the Spring of 2016, Stephen Dubner released a series of podcasts in the Freakonomics Radio feed under the theme of self-improvement. He featured prominent personalities like Malcolm Gladwell and Tim Ferris during the series, but the series kicked off with an interview with Anders Ericsson, a Swedish research psychologist who got his start studying nuclear engineering. …

Today is the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of what’s felt like the longest year. From the initial onset of the pandemic, reckoning with racial injustice, the election, and more, it has felt like inching out to a ledge of snow, not knowing whether it is a cornice that could suddenly collapse under our weight.

There is an Inuit expression called qarrtsiluni, that roughly means “sitting together in darkness waiting for something to burst or break”. For the Inuit, this was meant literally, where men would go to a festival house without light or lamps, and sit in the darkness waiting for a song to come to them, bubbling up from the depths of the sea. …

The Postcard Game was thunk up in the common room of Len Hostel Kyoto Kawaramachi late in the evening of March 26th, 2019. Borne out of a conversation between fellow postcard writers Barry Leybovich and Terri-Louise Doyle over whiskey and matcha-flavored KitKats, it is exceedingly simple.

Exceedingly Simple Rules

1. Each person buys a postcard, stamps it, and writes down the name and address of a recipient.
2. Swap cards — this does not need to be limited to two people, this can just as easily be done in groups with everyone passing their cards one over.
3. Write a letter to a perfect stranger, preferably at the same time. …

Pandemic Love

Jamie clicked her heels a few times absentmindedly, faintly wishing doing so would return her home. Whatever home would even be, having spent the past six years since graduating college jumping from apartment to apartment across cities and oceans. Now she stood at the front of the line outside of Trader Joe’s, smiling faintly at the Hawaiian-shirt-clad, bearded associate and waiting to be ushered in. He was handsome, Jamie thought to herself, flitting with the question of whether he’d be any useful in the apocalypse. He has a box cutter at least. She’d been waiting for fifty-seven minutes already in a line that extended down the block and then turned around the corner and out of sight, and Jamie was bored. As she tightened her coat against the chilly March wind, she wondered for a time about the men and women she saw still going to work — what jobs might they have that their offices hadn’t closed? …

Sometimes, Sam Harris’s Making Sense podcast really bugs me. Truly, I think Harris is a smart guy — I appreciate his podcast and in particular I applaud his focus on important but underrepresented content such as effective altruism, existential risk, privacy, child sexual abuse, and more. And because of those great things, it’s probably all the more disappointing when he flubs.

In no example is this more obvious than in Harris’s podcast with Charles Murray, who is known fairly widely as a racist, and also as a pseudoscientist. Murray is known for this so much so, that the top hit for a search on him leads you to a page not from Wikipedia, but from the Southern Poverty Law Center denouncing him. Harris, in hosting a conversation with Murray, was less interested in the latter’s actual views on race and science, but rather wanted to engage more on free speech, cancel culture, and political correctness. …

Content warning: This piece briefly mentions death by suicide.

This should be fairly obvious. I can practically hear you thinking that only a nerd like me could ever think otherwise. We’ll ignore for now the behavioral psychologists whose lives’ work is literally to quantify relationships as math, but I agree with you, relationships are not math. Because, unlike relationships, math is easy.

Maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise to hear the son of a once-aspiring math teacher say that math is easy. My mom studied for years to become a math teacher in Soviet Ukraine only to be thwarted by her accent as an émigré here in the United States. It wasn’t just the accent though, many Soviets — and immigrants from all over the world — are successful in the US despite thick accents. My mother though additionally possesses the particular potent propensity to swallow any words that she’s unsure of. Combined, she often comes of as meek in English, in a way that’s rather incompatible with becoming a teacher, and also is in rather sharp contrast to the tongue lashings my brother and I would receive in Russian at home. …