Virtual Worlds · Digital Culture · AI Literati
The first time I heard the word saudade, I was sitting in a cafe in Lisbon that smelled like burnt sugar and old wood, and the woman at the next table was trying to explain it to an American tourist w...
Read article →In 1985, a Filipino psychologist named Virgilio Enriquez published a paper that should have changed everything. He described a concept called kapwa, a Tagalog word that roughly translates to shared id...
Read article →There is a word in Finnish that I think about more than is probably reasonable. Kalsarikannit. It translates, roughly, to the act of drinking alone at home in your underwear with absolutely no intenti...
Read article →I grew up in a household where nobody ever explained social dynamics. You were just supposed to figure it out. Read the room, my mother would say, as if reading rooms were a skill you were born with,...
Read article →There is a word in Japanese, tsundoku, that means buying books and letting them pile up unread. I learned this at three in the morning during one of those internet rabbit holes that starts with lookin...
Read article →There is a German word, Sehnsucht, that does not translate cleanly into English. The closest approximation is a longing for something you have never had, a homesickness for a place you have never been...
Read article →I attend funerals professionally. Not as an undertaker. As a researcher. For the past nine years, I have studied grief responses across demographic groups, and I can tell you with clinical certainty t...
Read article →My mother was sharpening a kitchen knife when she forgot what it was for. She stood there holding it like some artifact from a civilization she could no longer name, and I watched from the doorway, an...
Read article →My father had a heart procedure last March, and I spent nine hours in a hospital waiting room that seemed designed by someone who had never experienced fear. The chairs were hard plastic, bolted to th...
Read article →I drove through my hometown last October. Took the long way from the airport, past the high school, past the gas station where I had my first job, past the house on Elm where I kissed somebody for the...
Read article →I was twenty-nine the first time I went home for Christmas as someone who had actually done the work. Therapy, boundaries, the whole bit. I had scripts prepared. I had breathing exercises bookmarked o...
Read article →There was no argument. No betrayal. No dramatic falling out that I can point to and say: that is where it ended. My closest friend from my twenties and I just stopped. The gaps between texts got longe...
Read article →A friend called me at midnight last week, crying about a decision she'd already made. She didn't want me to tell her what to do. She didn't want a strategy. She didn't want my opinion on whether she'd...
Read article →Sunday night dread gets all the press, but nobody asks the obvious follow-up question: if the weekend is supposed to recharge you, why do you arrive at Monday feeling like you never left Friday? I tra...
Read article →My father retired on a Friday in June with a sheet cake from Costco and a card signed by forty-three people, most of whom he would never see again. He had worked in logistics for the same company for...
Read article →My wedding cost thirty-one thousand dollars. I know this because I kept the spreadsheet, which is the kind of detail that tells you everything about the kind of person I was at twenty-eight: the kind...
Read article →Consider the math for a moment. Your therapist sees you for fifty minutes, once a week, if you are consistent and your insurance cooperates. That is roughly forty-three hours a year. Your inner critic...
Read article →Okay, I need to talk about something that has been bothering me, and I promise this is going somewhere that is not just another lecture about putting your phone down. The phrase you have probably hear...
Read article →I peaked in 2019. Career trajectory pointing up and to the right. Side projects generating buzz. LinkedIn presence curated to the pixel. I had a color-coded calendar, a five-year plan, a personal miss...
Read article →I can name every bone in the human body. I can solve a quadratic equation. I can identify the major exports of Brazil and explain the causes of World War I with reasonable competence. I learned all of...
Read article →Somewhere between the invention of the bath bomb and the emergence of the 400-dollar meditation retreat, we lost the entire point of rest. I noticed it last month when a colleague told me she was prac...
Read article →Something strange happened when we gave everyone a microphone. We assumed that more voices would mean more understanding. That the sheer abundance of perspective would produce clarity, empathy, and pr...
Read article →There is a coffee shop in my neighborhood that has been there for twenty years. Wooden tables, mismatched chairs, a barista named Marco who remembers your order and asks about your dog. Last month the...
Read article →I am going to say something that will annoy both the people who think social media is destroying civilization and the people who think criticizing social media makes you a technophobe. Ready? Both of...
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