Where I’ve been.

It’s just as important to recognize what’s going well as what could be better.

The best worst year.

The year of the flood.

Far from being essential to our humanity, the belief in free will holds us back from being more humane and pragmatic.

Much of life is acting out the stories in our heads about who we are and what we’re doing. Changing the stories can in some ways change our lives.

It’s easy to start things, much harder to sustain them.

A morally nuanced action film for our time.

The ability to sustain deep focus on our most important work is growing rarer at the same time it’s becoming more essential.

Lessons from a master chef on the business and craft of cooking.

And one.

Cooking made us human, and continues to remind us of what that means.

Institutional racism depends more on indifference than outright hostility.

“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

Artificial superintelligence poses the greatest threat to our species, a threat we had better start addressing soon if we're to have any hope of addressing it at all.

On two birthdays.

Meaning is found not in what we expect from the world, but what the world expects from us.

How mindfulness finally clicked for me.

Can there ever be a just empire?

Violence does not stem from a psychopathic lack of morality. Quite the reverse: it comes from the exercise of perceived moral rights and obligations.