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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I did not see that coming
Freud, told his cancer might kill him, replied that it may be fatal but it’s not serious — a distinction that cuts cleanly through an issue wrestling with what actually deserves to be taken seriously. Kahneman’s separation of happiness from satisfaction adds another wedge. And somewhere in the middle, a gifted copy of Becoming a…
Irrelevant in all circumstances
Mary Rueflé’s admission stops the issue cold: she writes not because she has something to say, but because she hasn’t yet heard what she’s been listening for. From there, a Picasso exhibition becomes a meditation on prolific output versus dark sides, Muhammad Ali reframes who’s really crossing whose road, and a unearthed presentation from Denmark…
The pause between
David Bowie warns against playing to the gallery. Alan Jacobs points out that rushing through leisure means you’ve missed the point entirely. But the sharpest turn comes near the end: a reconsideration of gatekeepers — not as barriers keeping you out, but as walls keeping you in — borrowed, improbably, from a Douglas Adams asylum…
Changing the world
The urge to change the world, it turns out, was really just an urge for control all along. That realization threads through an issue preoccupied with what happens when you remove a destination — from gratitude journaling, from long walks, from the writing itself. Chekhov has a quietly devastating line about good upbringing. And Asimov,…
There was a script?
A day spent stacking firewood — wheelbarrow, stack, patio, repeat — turns out to be genuinely enjoyable, mostly because cold winters make the meaning legible. That thread of finding direct pleasure in what you’re doing winds through Murakami, Arnold Bennett on time versus money, and a mind-mapping session with a favorite pen that finally broke…
Chatter and peace
Mental chatter turns out to sound, on close listening, like an extremely boring and self-absorbed person — and the only reliable cure is to stop taking on things that weren’t worth doing in the first place. The issue moves through Tolstoy, Marcus Aurelius, and the surprising relief of withdrawing from the opinion confetti gun —…
Never say never
George Carlin puts a dollar in a change machine and nothing changes. Morgan Housel notes that the most important things are also the hardest to teach. Somewhere between the two, the issue quietly works through a two-part test for when to stick and when to pivot — and arrives at the somewhat counterintuitive conclusion that…
Thank you I. Asimvo
Halfway across the Williamsburg Bridge, crawling through October drizzle and thinking about quitting, a chalk message appears on the pavement directly underfoot: IDIDNTEATHECROISSANT. That moment — exhausted, laughing, suddenly remembering why — carries the whole issue. Around it: Asimov on knowing your ending before you begin, Proust on what art is actually trying to undo,…
Slow, surreal
A surreal afternoon on the patio — doing nothing in particular and finding it, oddly, fine — anchors an issue that keeps circling the question of what we’re actually entitled to: opinions, resources, endings, explanations of consciousness. Yoda weighs in on failure. Isaac Asimov insists you must know your ending, or the river of your…
Human collaborators
Elizabeth Gilbert’s notion that ideas are conscious beings spinning through the cosmos looking for human collaborators sets the tone for an issue preoccupied with what gets lost in translation — when technology divorces stimulation from the people in the room, when scale crowds out memorability. There’s also a mattress getting shoved off a platform bed,…