Podcaster. Writer. 👋 Hello, I want us to go from simply having conversations, to actively creating better conversations — https://craigconstantine.com/ has more about me, and my ongoing projects.
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Everything worthwhile turns out to be some-assembly-required — and some-assembly-required implies the result is more than the sum of its parts. That thread pulls through Murakami on the honor of physical decline, a meditation on local maxima and whether you can actually see anything from the hilltop you’re standing on, and the quiet, urgent reminder…
Bibliofervor
The English language was missing a word for the nearly uncontrollable urge to press a book into someone’s hands and say no, you have to read this right now, let me hold your coffee — and now it has one. Bibliofervor anchors an issue moving through Harper Lee on real courage, Mark Manson’s distinction between…
Happy. Generous. Contributing.
Three questions — am I happy, am I generous, am I contributing to the world? — form the axis the issue turns on, with the honest acknowledgment that answering yes to all three simultaneously, over the course of a life, is the actual moral challenge. Elsewhere: over 1,300 daily podcast episodes, and the gradual realization…
Our experience of time
An octopus, who can move and see in all directions simultaneously, probably conceptualizes time completely differently than we do — which lands just after a description of drifting into a patio trance with no clear sense of whether a moment or ten minutes passed. Randall Munroe’s cartoon notes that daytime is just us closing our…
Bezzle
“Bezzle” — the magic interval when the con artist knows he has the money but the victim doesn’t yet know it’s gone — is only the first detour in an issue that wanders through radium suppositories, the question of whether your primary language limits the thoughts you’re capable of having, and the discovery of No!vember…
The practice
The hard part of the practice is never the work itself — it’s the way you think about the work before you ever begin. Around that insight: a backyard ultra where runners circle a 4.1-mile loop in Tennessee until only one person is left, which turns out to be a surprisingly useful definition of true…
I should take a break
Five and a half transcendental hours with toes in the sand, perfectly managing hydration and kidney function — foiled only by beach mates dragging him into the ocean. The issue asks, with characteristic precision, whether having one of something might actually mean having none, and whether the whole attention problem is really about cleaving the…
Civility
Three high school students realize the exam is hackable, keep it secret, and race to answer as many questions as possible at 60% correct — which turns out to be a personal origin story for a lifetime of thinking like a hacker. Around it: Vannevar Bush’s eighty-year-old observation that the mountain of knowledge and the…
Festina lente
Charles Simic recommends testing every grand theory in the kitchen first — ideally with sausages, potatoes, and a philosopher on hand. Elizabeth Gilbert wants to live slowly enough to hear herself living. And the fading affect bias explains why the worst adventures are the ones you’re most glad you had: the badness fades faster than…
Issue 52
A year in, fifty-two issues deep, and the question that surfaces is surprisingly personal: not what do I do, but what am I? Murakami stares into his own nature and finds clouds have nothing useful to say. Borges insists that everything — humiliations, embarrassments, misfortunes — is raw material, clay for sharpening the art. Jorge…