The Next Big Idea Club Book of the Day Newsletter

1. Most people know their siblings longer than they’ll ever know anyone else.

Right at the start of the pandemic, I was on the phone with an old colleague who I used to work with in radio. I was talking about my sisters and joked that I should make a podcast about them. She said, “Don’t do that. That would be a bit strange, but maybe you should make a podcast about siblings. Did you know your relationship with them could be the longest of your life?”

I had never heard that idea before, and, seeing as the genes in my family tend toward longevity—my grandma was 99 when she died—that could mean I would know my two sisters, one older and one younger, for around 83 and 87 years, respectively. I sat up like I’d been struck by lightning. After that moment, I couldn’t stop thinking about brothers and sisters. It was as if a filter had been put over my eyes: in every book, every film, every friendship, every relationship, I suddenly saw the sibling dynamics at play, and I became obsessed.

These relationships are unique. They start off vertically due to birth order, but over time, those relationships can move from vertical to horizontal, becoming more peer-like. We can become friends with our siblings. We can stand in the same spot in time and survey the future and the past together. It’s an incredible relationship that evolves so much over those decades from playmates to adults. We might make each other uncles and aunties or give one another brothers- and sisters-in-law. Then, if we get through the midlife crunch, we could get to old age together. Research shows that strong sibling bonds pay off in well-being later in life.

2. We should talk more about sibling bonds.

We simply don’t talk about siblings enough. I’ve heard siblings described as the missing piece of psychoanalysis. The therapists I spoke with said they were heavily trained in parent-child and romantic relationships, but not as much in sibling relationships that turn from vertical to horizontal.

“I’ve heard siblings described as the missing piece of psychoanalysis.”

When people talk about siblings, they get snagged and stuck on birth-order tropes. We joke about the responsible eldest and roll our eyes at the spoiled babies. Maybe there’s a grain of truth in some of that, but we must get beyond that to fully understand these bonds.

My aim is to provide a kind of language to make us more fluent in talking about sibling relationships. We already have a lot in the culture that enables conversations about romantic partners or parents—we have the words. I don’t think we have the words yet for siblings.

3. Why siblings end up in therapy in midlife.

There’s a pattern in sibling relationships that can be compared to the shape of an egg timer. Generally, we grow up in the same house, so we spend a lot of time with them when we’re young. This is the fat bit at the bottom of the egg timer.

In early adulthood or late adolescence, we tend (in the West) to leave home, strike out, search for partners and a job, maybe go to college, find a flat—all those things. We move into different life stages, and it can feel like you’re leaving people behind or being left behind. If you don’t yet have a partner or a job or your own home, you can feel quite far away from those people around you who have moved into those life stages. And that’s quite true with siblings. This phase is that skinny bit in the middle of the egg timer, representing a leaner time for sibling contact.

The fatter bit at the top of the egg timer is when we arrive in middle age, and that’s quite a broad and deep part of life. It lasts a long time. And by that point, we’ve all realized a little bit what life is like. We’ve had some knocks and arrived at the same period together. And it’s around this age that our parents might start to grow frailer, certainly older, and may die. That is the key point at which adult siblings are thrust back into each other’s orbits if they haven’t already sought each other out.

If, in the process of reaching midlife, you and your siblings never moved from a vertical, hierarchical pattern to something more horizontal, like friendship—if those old, often two-dimensional labels haven’t been replaced by a fuller understanding and appreciation of each other as functioning adults—then reconnecting during a time of emotional upset can be difficult. We might fall back into old patterns of relating to one another that aren’t very helpful and may not sustain us through the difficult challenges of finding care homes, caring for our parents ourselves, or deciding what to do with family homes and inheritance. This is a major flashpoint for sibling upset, argument, and estrangement.

“We might fall back into old patterns of relating to one another that aren’t very helpful and may not sustain us through the difficult challenges.”

Even though it’s natural that there’s that skinnier bit in the middle when we’re all going out into the world, I think there’s something in the idea of trying to intentionally make friends with our siblings in adulthood. By laying down good foundations for that crunch in midlife, we might manage those difficult chapters better and emerge as happier older people ourselves as a result.

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4. Estrangement is more common than you think.

In 2021, the author Fern Schumer Chapman wrote a book about her estrangement from her brother. She told her publisher she’d like to include the word “estrangement” in the title, and they told her, “Don’t do that. Nobody knows what that means.” Here we are in 2026, and we’ve seen some really public, very sad stories of estrangement play out in the media: the Beckhams, the Murdochs, and the British royal family.

I think we do know what that word means now, but did you know that 28 percent of siblings go through a period of estrangement? And it’s not binary. It’s not “cut off,” as perhaps unhelpfully discussed on social media. It’s more of a moving in and out of intimacy over time.

It’s important to think about estrangement because, for all I’ve said about the goal of making friends and becoming equals with your brothers and sisters, I don’t believe we should feel obligated to be anything in particular to them. That expectation—reflected in foundational stories like Cain and Abel, as well as in morality tales and nursery rhymes across cultures—can be harmful. If we internalize the idea of what we ought to be to our siblings, we may feel unable to acknowledge or complain when those relationships are hurtful, even violent or deeply upsetting. That, I think, is damaging. And because we don’t talk about sibling relationships enough, we rarely confront these realities.

We don’t talk about sibling violence. We don’t talk about what it’s like when those relationships break down, or how it feels to sit on a distant branch of the family tree—aware that you’re still connected to this person, yet lacking the language to articulate that connection. Maybe you don’t even feel able to talk about it with others because it has been largely taboo until recently.

Estrangement also gets to the heart of the sibling experience and the paradox of a “shared childhood,” which, in many ways, isn’t really shared at all. Although we often spend a lot of time physically together in the same home, our experiences of growing up are totally different, and our memories of that time are different. There are so many variables that no childhood can be the same as another’s, even if siblings are born to the same parents and live in the same place. Your parents will be older or younger than they were when your sibling was born. They might be richer or poorer. You might have lost a grandparent or gained a family pet. You might be at a different school than your siblings. You may have moved countries. Your personality may bring out different aspects of your parents’ personalities.

“If we internalize the idea of what we ought to be to our siblings, we may feel unable to acknowledge or complain when those relationships are hurtful.”

When we talk about childhood memories, the variability between siblings’ experiences becomes clear. The way we lay down, store, and recollect memories has so much to do with what we were feeling when the event happened. You might have gone to the coast with your older brother, and that is why you are terrified of the sea, because you remember those wild waves that threatened to sweep you off the beach. But your older brother loves the sea, and when he thinks about that day spent together, he doesn’t remember anything about the rough waves at all. The reason for the difference in experience could be as simple as the fact that you were two and he was six. The waves were big to you and very small to him. This example is small, but it applies to almost everything about our childhood.

Sibling perspectives will never be the same. As adults, if we want to make friends with our siblings, part of that process is accepting that each child of a family will have a different set of feelings tightly wound around memories of the same times. Memories aren’t like DVDs. So, if you talk about your shared memories and your different memories with your brothers and sisters, then you must respect everybody else’s memories and maybe accept a messy collage of your childhoods. Who’s to say which bits are true? The key is that you can agree on the compromise.

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5. Sibling bereavement.

Siblings who lose a brother or sister are often called the forgotten mourners. They’re asked to support everyone else through their loss and are rarely given attention to how the experience affects them. If parents lose one of their children, that’s a loss that we recognize as titanic. Similarly, if a child loses a parent, we recognize how incredibly difficult that is. But we don’t talk enough about a sibling losing somebody with whom they have shared their entire history.

However imperfectly, siblings remember each other’s roles in the family story. Your sibling is your best chance to travel back in time to those family holidays, sitting in the back car seat with your brother or sister on the way to grandma’s house. That history your sibling can help you keep is lost when they die.

“Your sibling is your best chance to travel back in time to those family holidays, sitting in the back car seat with your brother or sister on the way to grandma’s house.”

We often take our siblings for granted because we know they might be with us for those 70, 80, 90 years. And because they’re blood, we almost assume that they are not going anywhere. When they do go, that creates a very complicated kind of grief.

I end by talking about bereavement because I think unless and until we’ve talked about all the other aspects of our sibling relationship—from birth order through the idea of labels and roles that we might assume in the family, to memories, to being friends—until we’ve done all of that, we can’t really appreciate the enormity of what it might be to lose a sibling.

The Hidden Flaw in Every Study You've Ever Read

Michael Kovnat — Sat, 30 May 2026 13:50:33 GMT

The Big Idea: Statistical thinking isn’t a math skill, it’s a reasoning skill. And once you have it, you start catching things most people miss: the survey that left out a whole generation, the study that only shared the convenient results, the headline that sounds definitive but proves nothing. Data is everywhere. The ability to question it well is rare.

Why It Matters: We’re living through a flood of statistics, studies, and expert claims on health, money, diet, and more. Most of it arrives without context, caveats, or any indication of how the data was collected. The people who know to ask “who’s missing from this sample?” or “what would disprove this?” navigate that flood differently. They’re harder to mislead, and they make better decisions.

Try This Today: The next time you encounter a surprising statistic, ask two questions before you act on it or share it: Who was in this data? And who might have been left out?

These ideas come from What Are the Odds?: A Statistical Guide to Certainty in an Uncertain World by Mark Prell. Mark is a former senior economist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Co-Chair of the Federal Committee on Statistical Methodology, and economics professor at Johns Hopkins University. Read on for 5 of his big ideas.

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1. Data and their quality are important.

You might analyze data for a business, a hospital, a school district, or this evening you might read about, say, the latest dietary advice on a webpage. Along the way, you will want to ask two key questions: “What do the data say?” and “Are the data any good?” All data have strengths and limitations. You want to understand the data’s quality, which involves accuracy along with several other dimensions of quality, such as relevance, granularity, and timeliness.

It may be intuitive that poor data can affect a study’s conclusions. What is more subtle is how data quality can be diminished or enhanced based on how the data are collected. One story of a threat to data quality, which had national implications, emerged in the early 2000s when households were getting rid of their landline phone service, turning instead to cell phones.

Back then, most organizations that conducted phone surveys were still relying on old-fashioned methods that called numbers only for landline telephones. As a result, data for young adults tended to be missed in these surveys because young adults disproportionately relied on cell phones. Although certain adjustments are possible to make corrections, national estimates can be affected by such discrepancies. Fortunately, by the end of the 2010s, most survey organizations had added cell phone numbers to the mix.

In data about people, it is a good idea to consider which demographic groups are captured well, and which might be underrepresented or even missing altogether in the data. There is an old saying: If the strands of your fishing net are six inches apart, you will think that all fish in the lake are bigger than six inches.

2. Statistics is about finding patterns in our data.

What does it mean to find a pattern in the data? A striking example comes from the dawn of statistics, and it shows why data can be so valuable and why statistics can be so engaging.

Beginning in 1603, an account of burials and christenings in London was published each week, along with an annual summary at the end of each year. The data were collected from individual Anglican churches, totaled up for the city, and published in what was called the Bills of Mortality. Through continuous monitoring, the weekly Bills could serve as an early warning system to indicate when a plague was gathering force. But the Bills of Mortality had other uses too.

“It is a good idea to consider which demographic groups are captured well, and which might be underrepresented or even missing altogether in the data.”

John Graunt was a little-known cloth merchant in London who had a knack for numbers. Graunt is widely considered to be the father of statistics due to the one book he wrote, first published in 1662. Graunt was the first person to assemble the many years’ worth of dusty Bills of Mortality, and then use the data to study the patterns that they revealed.

Notably, he discovered evidence that the official counts of plague deaths in the Bills undercounted how many deaths were actually due to plague. The statistical approach he developed to make that discovery about plague deaths has modern applications. In 2022, using a method that rests on John Graunt’s pioneering work, the World Health Organization estimated for various countries the excess mortality due to COVID-19.

Today's Book of the Day sponsor is Quiet Strength by Margaret Cullen, with a foreword by Dr. Daniel J. Siegel. Cullen, founder of Mindfulness-Based Emotional Balance, draws on decades of mindfulness practice to reveal the power of equanimity — the ancient practice of being fully present with life's struggles without being hijacked by them. Featuring guided meditations and groundbreaking research, this is a roadmap to finding peace amid chaos.

3. Bayes’ Theorem.

Bayes’ Theorem shows the connection between observable effects and hidden underlying causes. This theorem is not a new one, it is simply a very valuable one. It was developed by Thomas Bayes, an English minister, who died in 1761; his theorem was nearly lost, but a friend reviewed Bayes’ papers and published it.

One use of Bayes’ Theorem is for the detection of cancer. A mammogram can be used as a test to assess whether a woman shows signs of breast cancer. Like other medical tests, it is not 100 percent conclusive because sometimes it can be mistaken—in two opposite ways.

A test can miss detecting cancer that is present.
A test can falsely say that cancer is present when the patient is free of cancer.

So, the medical and statistical question becomes: when a mammogram indicates that cancer is present, what is the probability that the patient has cancer?

Bayes’ Theorem answers the question and, fortunately, a solution can be found using a pen-and-paper diagram, which for many people can be more intuitive and interpretable than a complex equation. The test result, along with Bayes’ Theorem, informs and empowers both the patient and the doctor. If a mammogram says that cancer is present, they may decide to proceed with a biopsy for stronger evidence. A benefit of using a mammogram as an initial, non-invasive test is that it spares many women from getting biopsies.

4. Ethics are essential for, and come from, scientific and statistical practice.

In 1965, the biologist Jacob Bronowski published the book Science and Human Values. Bronowski’s central proposition was that certain values or ethics come from within science itself because they are conditions for its practice. Even for a simple verification of a fact, any one of us needs to rely on others and, specifically, to trust their word.

Bronowski wrote much about trust and connected it to the ethical principle of truthfulness. That principle is obligatory for each scientist. Truthfulness includes honesty—that we do not lie. Moreover, truthfulness also demands that we not leave out a relevant part of the truth. That is what the cherry pickers do, meaning those phony experts who pick through data or quotes or the body of evidence to select only those points that make their arguments seem strong.

“Truthfulness also demands that we not leave out a relevant part of the truth.”

To Bronowski, the search for truth creates a web of interrelated values beyond truthfulness, including independence and dissent. However, if honesty and dissent were the only values practiced by scientists, nobody would be listening to anybody else. Science would fail. In response, the community of scientists works hard to instill additional values of mutual respect and tolerance. The Ethical Guidelines of the American Statistical Association provide helpful details on how researchers should conduct themselves.

Today, our society can benefit by learning more about the ethics of science and statistics. The community of truthfulness and respect is not exclusively for scientists. The community knows no bounds, and it helps sustain civil society. It is open to any of us.

5. The scientific method is about disproof rather than proof.

In the mid-1900s, a new perspective emerged that has influenced how scientists think about what they are doing as they conduct experiments and statistical tests. This view holds that science cannot “prove” a hypothesis or theory to be a final, unchanging, irrefutable “proven” truth. Instead, experiments can disprove a hypothesis. The process of disproof is called falsification.

As the tools for statistical testing tools developed in the 1900s, they made use of and contributed to the methodology of falsification. In his monumental 1937 book on designing experiments, Ronald Fisher, a British statistician and geneticist, wrote that the null hypothesis is never proved or established, but is possibly disproved by the experiment.

In Fisher’s language, the “null hypothesis” is the hypothesis or theory that is potentially “nullified”—that is, falsified—by the experiment. And he wrote that every experiment exists only to give the facts a chance of disproving the null hypothesis.

“The process of disproof is called falsification.”

When observed data do fit a hypothesis—when the hypothesis is not falsified—then the data are said to be consistent with the hypothesis or theory, or to support or corroborate it. But that confirmation of the theory does not prove the theory to be true, forever and always.

For example, in the 1900s, Einstein’s general theory of relatively superseded Newton’s theories about gravity and the laws of motion by elaborating and improving on what Newton accomplished. Although tests and applications of Newtonian theory had been successful for generations, even such extensive data did not prove Newtonian theory to be unimprovably true. While today data are consistent with Einstein’s theory, sooner or later that theory may face disparities with data that require it to be modified. The process never ends: there will always be more experiments to run, more anomalies to find, and better theories to imagine.

What Does It Mean to Be American?

Michael Kovnat — Fri, 29 May 2026 13:24:58 GMT

The Memorial Day holiday this week wasn’t just a day off work, though I do hope you got that. It also offered us a chance to honor those who gave their lives in service to our country, and it left us thinking about what being an American is really all about. As this week’s podcast guest points out, it’s a somewhat unstable identity, one whose meaning has evolved over the last two and a half centuries. Read on to dive into an oratorical history of the nation, along with other big ideas we came across this week.

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, All We Say: The Battle for American Identity: A History in 15 Speeches

This Week on the Next Big Idea Podcast

What does it mean to be American?

America’s a funny place. It’s not a country with a fixed geographic or religious identity. We don’t have a common story of divine creation. “What we have,” writes in his new book, ⁠All We Say⁠, “are words.” The words of the founding documents, yes — but also “the words of speeches spoken by Americans who call us to be that better version of ourselves.”

Ben has spent more time with great American speeches than just about anyone. For eight years, he was a speechwriter in the Obama White House, crafting some of the defining oratory of the era. His new book is a 250-year tour through 15 speeches that built the country, challenged it, and raised its sights.

He tells us how FDR changed the course of WWII from behind the lectern, how MLK ad-libbed one of the most famous lines in American history, and what Obama’s 2008 speech about race can teach today’s politicians about storytelling. And he makes the case that America needs great oratory now more than it has in a long time. Check out our conversation with Ben on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

Book Bite of the Week

Can walking change your life?

Walking and foot health are fundamental to overall health — not optional fitness habits. Unfortunately, modern lifestyles and footwear are weakening the body’s evolved design for regular movement. Fitness experts Dr. Milica McDowell and Dr. Courtney Conley share five key insights from their new book, Walk: Rediscover the Most Natural Way to Boost Your Health and Longevity―One Step at a Time on the Next Big Idea app.

This week’s Book of the Day sponsor is Effective by Melissa Swift. The modern workplace feels increasingly impossible — work has intensified, chaos seems constant, and everything seems designed to make you feel incompetent. Swift, founder of Anthrome Insight, offers a refreshingly practical path: how to get your job done well without losing your mind. Drawing surprising lessons from professions where failure isn’t an option — firefighters, air traffic controllers, ER doctors — this is a paradigm-shifting guide for anyone trying to do meaningful work today.

🎉 Happy Publication Week! 🎉

The following Next Big Idea Club Must-Read authors got to celebrate the publication of their books this week — congratulations to them all! 📖 Join us in reading and discussing these exciting new releases:

Eric Ries, Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad... and How Great Companies Stay Great

Jack Parlett, Flamboyance: The Power of Living Boldly

Soumaya Keynes & Chad P. Bown, How to Win a Trade War: An Optimistic Guide to an Anxious Global Economy

Stephanie Coontz, For Better and Worse: The Complicated Past and Challenging Future of Marriage

, A Pox on Fools: The True Believers, Grifters, and Cynics Who Convinced Us to Reject Vaccines

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You're Not Just Watching the Screen Anymore. You're Living Inside It.

Michael Kovnat — Thu, 28 May 2026 13:48:02 GMT

Listen to this article instead:

The Big Idea: The internet hasn’t just changed how we communicate, it’s changed who we are. When screens became two-way, we became two-way too: simultaneously human beings and pieces of media. That shift has consequences we’re only beginning to reckon with.

Why It Matters: Objectification used to be something that happened to people. Online, it’s the default condition. Every video call, every post, every scroll turns us into images of ourselves — watched, judged, and consumed. The result isn’t just anxiety. It’s a slow erosion of how we relate to each other.

Try This Today: The next time you’re about to send a sharp message to someone online, pause and imagine saying it to their face. That gap between what you’d type and what you’d say in person is the “online disinhibition effect.” and noticing it is the first step to more humane communication.

These ideas come from Screen People: How We Entertained Ourselves into a State of Emergency by Megan Garber. Megan is a staff writer at The Atlantic who covers culture, and a former reporter at the Nieman Journalism Lab and critic at the Columbia Journalism Review. Read on for 5 of her big ideas.

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1. The internet is rapidly changing what it means to be human.

In recent years, the word “human” has become something of a cliche. Goods are marketed as “human-powered,” and we compliment people by saying things like “what a great human.” That language reflects the reality—and the anxiety—of life in these early days of the digital age. The internet can sometimes seem like an endless CAPTCHA test, always asking us to prove that we are, in fact, humans (rather than, say, a product of AI). And language that literally humanizes people is acknowledging the broad consequences of that demand. “Human,” in digital spaces and more broadly, is no longer a given. It’s becoming one possibility among many.

Someone who anticipated that shift was Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian theorist best known for his idea that “the medium is the message.” For McLuhan, communications technologies like TV and newspapers—what he would call mediums—are different from other kinds of technologies. They might seem like things that we use and control; they might seem like straightforward conveyors of what today we’d call content. But—and this is the message part—mediums shape the content, too. And along the way, they shape the humans who consume it.

McLuhan introduced his theories in the 1960s, when the medium that was transforming life was television. He was talking about screens, but ones that operated, essentially, in one direction: TVs broadcast moving images and audiences consumed them.

But the screens of the internet work much, much differently. They’re not one-way propositions. They are interactive. Think of a service like Zoom, which turns “see and be seen” into a technological proposition. Two-way screens, in general, remake us as two-way people. On them, we’re both humans and pieces of media, three-dimensional bodies and two-dimensional images—we’re whos and whats at once. The duality is basic, in one way—it’s just how screens work—but they’re also deeply consequential. After all, in the world at large, “objectification” is widely recognized as a violation: as an insult, as a problem. In the world of screens, though, objectification is just a fact of physics. Objectification is the internet’s price of admission.

“Two-way screens, in general, remake us as two-way people.”

And screen-based objectification is becoming ever more common and ever more systematized. As the internet edges ever closer to becoming a way of life, screens are expanding from what they’ve been for so long—things people watch—into things people inhabit. They are places where a growing number of humans work, meet, learn, date, fight, laugh, and live their lives. Screens are technologies that are also, in a very real sense, human environments. And, every day, we’re doing what all creatures do when they contend with new environments: We’re adapting to them. And often, whether we mean to or not, we’re conceding to them.

2. “Main character energy” is becoming a cultural crisis.

A few years ago, the clothing chain H&M launched an ad campaign based on the idea that the store’s clothes would allow the people who wore them to become “the main character of each day.” The campaign was nicely prescient. Main characters—the exhibitors of “main character energy”—are everywhere these days. It’s common now for people to talk about their own character arcs, about “the writers” who allegedly script out world events, about people who have “lost the plot,” and people who have been “canceled.”

Such language isn’t fully new. Americans have traditionally admired people who are “larger than life” and seem cinematic. Sociologists have long talked about performance as a framework for understanding everyday social interactions. But the internet is bringing a new literalism to those ideas—in large part because its screens are stages that never end. On screens, we watch the spectacles, and we are the spectacles. We become each other’s critics. We become each other’s fun. All the world’s a stage, that longstanding metaphor, is becoming more like a mandate.

The consequences of that shift are expanding to nearly every facet of life, online and off. Screens, because they double as inescapable mirrors, are making self-consciousness ever more standardized. And many people now talk about daily life as a source of endless performance anxiety. They talk about the “fear of being perceived.” TikTokers have coined terms like “cocooning” and “bedrotting” to describe not just being at home but, specifically, staying home as a soothing alternative to the demands of public exposure.

Their reticence is revealing. When all the world’s a stage, all the world is also a set. Smartphones, on top of everything else, are movie studios in miniature, carried around in people’s pockets. They mean that anyone with a phone can become a cinematographer, producer, and content creator. Anyone can find themselves as the star—or the extra, or the scenery—in someone else’s show, whether they’ve consented to the spotlight or not.

We have everyday people becoming everyday celebrities. Celebrity elevates people, but it also tends to demean them, and sometimes even dehumanize them. Historically, celebrities have been people who function a lot like fictions: They’ve been what the artist Andy Warhol once called “half people.” Celebrity is becoming more accessible, or you might even say more democratized. But that also means that more people run the risk of getting cut down to size.

3. On screens, those most basic of facts—people—can come to seem like fictions.

In a social media post he sent in 2022, Donald Trump posed a question: “Why are people so mean?” he asked. It was a good question. And “main character” energy is one answer: Screens can muddle the distinction between real people and fictional ones. They can also make it easier than ever to wound people we’ve never met.

“Screens can muddle the distinction between real people and fictional ones.”

Screens do more than objectify people. They also distance people from one another. And physical distance has a way of becoming moral distance, too. Think how much easier it would be to speak badly of someone behind their back than to criticize them to their face.

Media theorists talk about the “online disinhibition effect”: the basic idea that some people behave differently in digital spaces than they would in physical ones. One explanation they offer for the discrepancy is that online environments can seem unreal to people in ways that IRL environments simply don’t. That explanation can extend to the people who populate those environments—especially when those real, human people are coexisting with bots and the pseudo-“people” generated by artificial intelligence. “Is that person real?” was once a question asked primarily by bigots. On the internet, though—and as a basic matter of digital hygiene—it’s a question we need to keep asking.

This week’s Book of the Day sponsor is Effective by Melissa Swift. The modern workplace feels increasingly impossible — work has intensified, chaos seems constant, and everything seems designed to make you feel incompetent. Swift, founder of Anthrome Insight, offers a refreshingly practical path: how to get your job done well without losing your mind. Drawing surprising lessons from professions where failure isn’t an option — firefighters, air traffic controllers, ER doctors — this is a paradigm-shifting guide for anyone trying to do meaningful work today.

4. The internet is revolutionary, but it is not unprecedented.

In 17th-century England, King James ordered his royal printers to create new editions of the King James Bible. They dutifully completed their assignment, only later to realize that in the editions they had just mass-produced, the Ten Commandments were missing a word. “Thou shalt not commit adultery” read as “Thou shalt commit adultery.” The typo, best I can tell, did not give rise to a spate of cheating scandals in early modern England. But the misprinted text—which would later be called the “Wicked Bible”—encouraged a different form of infidelity.

Before the printing press came along, Bibles were created by scribes. They were works of craftsmanship that could take months, sometimes even years, to produce. Bibles were rare and expensive, making the Church and its clergy the Bible’s gatekeepers. They presented its teachings to laypeople as both the law of the land and the mystic gift of an infallible deity—with text that was meant not to be questioned but simply obeyed.

But then that text got typos. The Word of God became the words of God—and the words, sometimes, conflicted. The early days of the printing press were also the early days of market capitalism. The two developments were deeply interconnected. And the Wicked Bible, however singular it was in its errors, had a lot of company. Its misprint was one of many that occurred as printers raced to get God’s words to market. The sloppiness had broad implications, especially because Christianity back then was so much more than a religion. It was politics. It was culture. It was life’s organizing principle. The Bible had been the source code for all of that. But the misprints suggested that the code could have bugs.

“The early days of the printing press were also the early days of market capitalism.”

That was destabilizing for people of the time. But it might feel quite familiar, too. The printing press brought transformations that anticipated the ones we’re navigating today: new forms of democratization, new forms of literacy, new forms of art and expression and knowledge—the old gatekeepers falling, and new ones clamoring to rise in their place. Our version of that can be even more unsteadying because it is also deeply personal. The printing press changed how people saw the world. The internet is changing how people see one another.

5. “The algorithm” is not destiny.

The science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke once observed that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” He meant the line as a nod to technology’s power. Today, the line might read more as a warning. The internet is machinery that can seem like magic, precisely because it often doesn’t seem like machinery at all.

Yes, its screens are objects made of metal and glass, and, yes, the worlds within those screens are designed by people who are guided by extremely analog incentives—money, status, and power—but many of the ways we talk about screens (as environments) downplay those realities. The internet as “ether,” for example, its information stored in the “cloud,” its workings decided by “the algorithm,” that formless entity that affects everyone and answers to no one. It’s easy to treat the internet as just another technology, indistinguishable from magic. But the treatment is counterproductive and simply incorrect. The internet is not a mystical force. It is not a foregone conclusion. It is machinery. Magical thinking may soothe us, but it won’t save us.

The internet was created by people in the hope that the endless connection it afforded would help us be more human and more humane. Every day, we’re testing whether those early ideals can still be realized. We’re making small choices that, taken together and over time, will shape what it means to be human on, and in, our screens. We owe it to ourselves, and the people who will follow us, to choose wisely.

The Psychiatrist Who Says You're Approaching Mental Health Backwards

Michael Kovnat — Wed, 27 May 2026 12:02:00 GMT

The Big Idea: Mental health isn’t just about diagnosing problems and fixing deficits. It’s also about recognizing the strengths, values, and capacities that are already alive inside you.

Why It Matters: Many of us move through life driven by ambition, distraction, anxiety, or the pursuit of comfort. But according to psychiatrist Paul Conti, lasting well-being comes from balancing those drives with something larger: the desire to contribute, connect, and help life flourish.

Try This Today: Write down three things that are already “going right” in your life—not achievements, but qualities: resilience, curiosity, kindness, persistence, honesty. Then ask yourself how you might build from there instead of starting from self-criticism.

These ideas come from What's Going Right: A Powerful New Method for Optimizing Your Mental Health by Paul Conti. Conti is a psychiatrist and president of Pacific Premier Group, a comprehensive mental health clinic, and has been featured on leading podcasts including those hosted by Andrew Huberman, Tim Ferriss, and Mel Robbins. Read on for 5 of his big ideas.

Know someone graduating from college or high school? Give the gift of lifelong learning with a membership to the Next Big Idea Club.

1. Begin with what’s going right.

This suggestion comes across as backward to a lot of people. That’s because the field of mental health has been built, almost entirely, on a deficit model.

The dominant framework—the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)—is literally a 1,120-page compendium of what can go wrong with a human mind. The DSM has offered a lot to the field, but its unintended legacy is a myopic culture of mental health stuck to what’s broken, what’s missing, and what needs to be fixed.

What I’ve seen across decades of clinical practice is that this approach misses something essential. Every person who has ever sat across from me, no matter how much they were struggling, brought something right, healthy, and good into that room with them. Usually, a lot of courage and curiosity. A capacity for honesty that most people would find difficult under far easier circumstances. Relationships that have survived adversity. Resilience that’s been earned, not given. And often a clear sense of what they want their life to look like, if only they could figure out how to get there.

By focusing on what’s going right, I’m not asking anyone to pretend that hard things haven’t happened or that suffering isn’t real. Real pain deserves real attention. But I am suggesting that the best place to start addressing your mental health isn’t in cataloging what’s gone wrong—it’s in identifying what’s already going well for you and building from there. Not because it’s more comfortable, but because it’s more effective.

When you begin with your strengths, existing capacities, values, and fundamental drives, you’re working with the grain of who you already are rather than fighting against some imagined ideal of who you (or others) think you should be.

Understood this way, mental health is less about repair and more about optimization. You don’t need to be broken to benefit from it. You don’t need a professional diagnosis to ask meaningful questions about your own life. And you don’t need a therapist in the room to begin. You need honesty, a willingness to look inward with some regularity, and—perhaps most importantly—the conviction that what you find there is worth taking seriously. Because it is.

2. Know what’s driving you.

Imagine that you’re driving a car, but the car is you: it’s the same vehicle you’ve been piloting your entire life. You know the roads you’ve taken and the ones avoided. You’ve had your share of breakdowns and stretches of smooth highway. Now ask yourself: What’s fueling this vehicle? What’s in the tank? The nature of what drives you determines not just how far you go, but whether you arrive anywhere worth being.

Every human being is driven by three fundamental forces: assertion, pleasure, and generation.

Assertion drive: This is the part of you that wants to influence your life and the world. It’s what gets you out of bed in the morning, makes you set goals, and provides the energy it takes to change things. At its best, the assertion drive produces ambition, persistence, and the kind of healthy competitiveness that pushes you to grow. When it runs unchecked, however, it tips over into dominance, control, and the belief that your needs deserve to override everyone else’s. You’ve met people for whom assertion has become their primary mode of existence, and you’ve probably noticed that spending time with them is exhausting.

Pleasure drive: This is the part of you that wants to enjoy life and feel good. This drive is the source of gratification, relaxation, connection, and relief. When the pleasure drive is balanced, it makes sure your life is worth living while also keeping you grounded. But when this drive gets off kilter, it fosters avoidance, overindulgence, and the pursuit of comfort at the cost of everything else. Many of the addictive behaviors I’ve treated over the years represent a pleasure drive that’s been commandeered—often in response to pain—into something that provides short-term relief while dismantling long-term well-being.

Generative drive: Of the three, the generative drive has been widely neglected by mainstream psychology. This is the part of you that wants to make things better for yourself, for the people you love, and for the world beyond your immediate circle. The generative drive is also behind creativity, learning, altruism, and the impulse to leave something of value behind. It’s what makes a person run into the surf to save a stranger caught in a rip current, not because it’s rational, and not because it feels good in a simple hedonic sense, but because something in them cannot choose to do otherwise.

Understanding which of these drives is running the show on any given day, and whether the three are in balance or at war, is one of the most clarifying things you can do for your own mental health. Most of us spend our lives toggling between assertion and pleasure, with the generative drive showing up only in glimpses. This book gives you tools to change that ratio.

3. Activate your generative drive.

My maternal grandmother wasn’t a therapist, philosopher, or self-help author. She grew up in a cramped row house in New Jersey, never received a formal education, and probably never thought of herself as remarkable in any way. But Grandma Grace—born Maria Gracia, daughter of Italian immigrants—was one of the most mentally healthy people I’ve ever known. The older I get, and the more patients I work with, the more clearly I see why.

Grandma Grace lived almost entirely from her generative drive. She spent her spare hours knitting blankets, scarves, and sweaters—not to wear them herself, but to give them away. She knew there was always someone nearby who needed one. During World War II, she worked a factory job and sent money back to her family in war-torn Italy. When she encountered a neighborhood girl who wasn’t receiving what she needed at home, she simply stepped in—providing love and support for years, without fanfare, without expectation of return.

Grandma Grace helped raise my siblings and me with the same quiet consistency. I sometimes wonder whether I would have made it through the harder stretches of my youth without her.

Generative drive is not something I invented. It is a biological reality, a fundamental human capacity present in every one of us, as basic to our nature as the drives toward assertion and pleasure. The evidence is everywhere: in the parent who stays up all night with a sick child, in the stranger who picks up litter in a park they’ll never visit again, in the artist who labors over work they may never be paid for, in the scientist who spends a career pursuing knowledge that won’t benefit them personally. We aren’t simply selfish creatures who occasionally act generously. We are creatures for whom generosity, creativity, and care are as natural as breathing.

What blocks the generative drive is usually some combination of unexamined fear, pain, and habituation to the other two drives. People whose lives are organized primarily around assertion often find it difficult to let their guard down enough to give freely. People whose lives are organized primarily around pleasure often mistake short-term comfort for flourishing. The generative drive requires a longer view and a larger container. It asks you to tolerate discomfort, invest in the future, and find meaning in contribution rather than control or gratification.

Activating your generative drive doesn’t require heroism. It can start as small as a handwritten note to someone who’s struggling, a decision to learn something challenging and new, or ten minutes of honest self-reflection at the end of the day. Grandma Grace didn’t wait for ideal conditions. She worked with what she had, and she used it to make things better.

This week’s Book of the Day sponsor is Effective by Melissa Swift. The modern workplace feels increasingly impossible — work has intensified, chaos seems constant, and everything seems designed to make you feel incompetent. Swift, founder of Anthrome Insight, offers a refreshingly practical path: how to get your job done well without losing your mind. Drawing surprising lessons from professions where failure isn’t an option — firefighters, air traffic controllers, ER doctors — this is a paradigm-shifting guide for anyone trying to do meaningful work today.

4. Become your own best friend.

Think about the best friend you’ve ever had: the one who would tell you a hard truth with kindness, who could hold your worst moments without judgment, who knew how to ask the right question at exactly the right time. Now ask yourself: Do I ever treat myself that way?

For most people I work with, the answer is no. In fact, most people speak to themselves in ways they would never speak to someone they loved. The inner voice they bring to their own struggles is not the voice of a thoughtful friend but the voice of a harsh prosecutor—cataloging failures, doubting intentions, and usually coming to the most unflattering interpretation of any ambiguous situation.

This matters tremendously because self-inquiry is one of the most powerful tools we have for building and sustaining mental health, as long as our inquiry is conducted with curiosity and compassion. When I encourage patients to examine their lives, the ones who make the most meaningful progress are never the ones who are hardest on themselves.

Self-inquiry involves checking in regularly with your structure of self, function of self, and drives. It also means asking honest questions about what you find. Not to criticize yourself, but to understand yourself. This distinction changes everything. When you judge yourself for being anxious, you typically get more anxious. But when you become curious about your anxiety—when it started, what triggers it, what function it’s been serving—the resultant understanding usually calms you down and offers you leverage.

One useful entry point into this kind of self-inquiry is to notice the gap in your function of self between your behaviors and your strivings. What you actually do, day to day, tells you a great deal about what you believe about yourself and what you think you deserve, as opposed to what you consciously aspire to.

When these two things are aligned, life tends to flow reasonably well. When they’re in conflict, that gap is precisely where some crucial work lives. A person who says they want to build closer relationships but consistently avoids vulnerability isn’t being inconsistent because they’re weak-willed. Something inside of them has decided that closeness isn’t safe. Getting curious about that—kindly, without self-condemnation—will shift everything.

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5. Change your life narrative.

Here is an exercise I return to again and again: write two versions of your own life story. Not a polished autobiography, just a page or two describing who you are and how you got here.

Write the first version through whatever lens comes naturally, without editing. Then write a second version, deliberately told through the lens of your generative drive. This second version will highlight your resilience, hard-won lessons, capacity for connection, the ways you have shown up for the people who needed you, the moments when you did the right thing even when it was difficult, and so on.

I did this exercise myself. The difference between my two versions was alarming. The first began with dysfunction, loss, and my brother’s suicide. The second began with my grandmother (who modeled simple goodness and profound kindness) and my parents (who, despite their struggles, built successful careers and raised children), with a winding path toward medicine that was driven by love rather than ambition, and a career that has given me the privilege of sitting with people in some of the most important moments of their lives. Both versions of my life narrative are true. But they have very different effects on the person reading them, not to mention the person living them.

The stories we tell ourselves about our lives are not neutral recordings. They are active forces that shape how we see ourselves, what we believe we deserve, and what we’re willing to attempt in life. A life narrative populated primarily by failure, loss, and inadequacy creates a particular kind of salience—it primes you to see evidence of those things in new situations, to interpret new information negatively, and to approach challenges with a pre-formed expectation of defeat. A life narrative that honestly acknowledges difficulty while also accounting for strength, learning, and connection creates something remarkably different. It doesn’t deny pain. It contextualizes it.

The goal of a well-constructed life narrative isn’t happiness—it’s benevolent accuracy. Most of us have been carrying around stories that are selectively edited in favor of our failures, because shame and self-criticism are louder and stickier than pride and self-compassion. The invitation here is to correct that editorial bias: to “take in the good,” as psychologist Rick Hanson puts it, with the same seriousness that you’ve been taking in the difficult and the painful.

Over time, it’s possible to view your life with kindness, an embodied sense of peace, contentment, gratitude, and delight. Not because life becomes easier with time, but because you finally have the full story available to you.

Anne Lamott's Guide to Writing Like a Human Being

Michael Kovnat — Tue, 26 May 2026 12:03:07 GMT

The Big Idea: Most of us write constantly these days, whether it’s texts, emails, or something more elaborate. Making your voice stand out, and distinguishing it from the AI slop that’s growing by the day, means learning to be clear, confident, and a little fun.

Why It Matters: Clear communication has become one of the most valuable professional and personal skills there is, and most of us are improvising. A handful of specific techniques can make a real difference.

Try This Today: Take one paragraph you’ve written recently and cut 20 percent of it. Replace one vague verb with a vivid one. Chances are, the sentence will instantly come alive.

These ideas come from Good Writing: 36 Ways to Improve Your Sentences by and . Neal spent 15 years in journalism before becoming a spiritual coach; Anne is the author of more than 20 books, including several New York Times bestsellers. Read on for 5 of their big ideas.

Know someone graduating from college or high school? Give the gift of lifelong learning with a membership to the Next Big Idea Club.

1. Nowadays, everybody’s a writer.

Most people used to communicate by speech: telephone calls with friends and relatives, in-person commands from bosses to their reports, the news on TV. Writing, when I grew up, was a specialized skill. That has all changed with email and texting.

Now, most work, friend, and family communication is in writing. In my youth, it wasn’t unusual for a CEO to be nearly illiterate, have terrible grammar, and ask others to write things out for them. In a world without spell check and online editors, written communication passed many eyes before being tossed into a wide audience. Not true anymore.

Anyone can go viral on any day now. And the expectation of getting your point across succinctly and well has never been higher. I love that everyone is writing and posting, telling their stories, and finding out who they are. It’s only good, for each person and for their family or community, because writing is good for the soul.

2. Grammar is boring.

We are not grammarians. Grammarly and other tools like it will soon fix everyone’s grammar. Making grammatical writing more persuasive isn’t like doing grammar. It can be fun. For one thing, there’s no right or wrong.

You aren’t going to be trolled for pumping up a sentence. If you delete a weak verb, like walked or liked, and replace it with a vivid word like trumped or embraced, then you’ll probably get more likes after getting your point across.

“You aren’t going to be trolled for pumping up a sentence.”

It is more fun for the writer to paint a clear picture in words, maybe even with flair or charm, as they communicate ideas, visuals, data, or memories. And it’s a pleasure and a relief for the reader to be presented with clear, easily understood sentences.

3. Some rules for persuasive writing are rules for life.

For conversations with friends, speeches to employees, political debates, emails, and texts—all communication—take out the boring stuff. You don’t always have to explain yourself. And you might want to respect your audience’s hope for brevity and novelty. That’s what we want. Short and fun. That’s what the human mind has always wanted.

If you can deliver a complicated message in short and fun segments, you can keep anyone’s attention forever. Clear, clean expression can be rare, and the recipient of our best efforts to share stories or information is blessed by our caring enough to get it right. To develop ourselves as people committed to the craft of communication through words gives us the tools of habit, practice, and courage. Who knows where these will take us?

This week’s Book of the Day sponsor is Effective by Melissa Swift. The modern workplace feels increasingly impossible — work has intensified, chaos seems constant, and everything seems designed to make you feel incompetent. Swift, founder of Anthrome Insight, offers a refreshingly practical path: how to get your job done well without losing your mind. Drawing surprising lessons from professions where failure isn’t an option — firefighters, air traffic controllers, ER doctors — this is a paradigm-shifting guide for anyone trying to do meaningful work today.

4. Writing is more collaborative than you think.

Even if you’ve always thought it was up to you to get things done, you’ll reach a point when you need others in the room. The best writers in the world share their work and ask for constructive criticism, regularly and openly. In writing, you can’t bury mistakes. They’re digitally stored forever. We absolutely need and deserve respectful feedback in our undertakings.

“The best writers in the world share their work and ask for constructive criticism, regularly and openly.”

As children, we were taught to keep our eyes on our own pages and compete to be the best, but the joy of working with someone—a writing buddy, a collective or writing group, and eventually maybe an editor—is one of writing’s great gifts. It’s wonderful to find someone who cares about your work and wants to help you be the very best you can be, as you will do the same for them. Writing and life can be lonely without respectful and fun companionship. Other people’s eyes on our work saves us from ourselves.

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5. Even if you don’t like writing, just do it.

No one cares whether your first version is crappy. All it needs is a framework and some key points and all the stuff in between. The point is to get the project going. You’ll find your way as you go. Whether it’s a little bit of writing or a lot of writing, just set it down first and worry about its wording later. Wanting it to go smoothly from the start ends in procrastination. Spill it out recklessly at first and then rein it in later. The world wants your ideas, your energy, your heart.

The water is cold when you first get in, but if you keep your butt in the chair and keep flailing, something magical happens. You start to like it. You warm up, you find your rhythm, you find the excitement of going a little bit farther out and then a little farther. When you get back to shore and step out of the water, you’re a bit different than when you got in. There’s a feeling of freshness and accomplishment, like you’re doing what you were meant to be doing all along.

What Trees Know About Living Well (That We've Completely Forgotten)

Michael Kovnat — Mon, 25 May 2026 11:38:20 GMT

The Big Idea: Trees are not just pretty scenery. They offer a master class in how to live: how to grow, adapt, connect, endure, and flourish over time.

Why It Matters: In a culture obsessed with speed, certainty, and self-optimization, trees offer a radically different model: branch out, prune wisely, stay rooted, and think in centuries.

Try This Today: Find a nearby tree and spend five minutes actually looking at it. Notice what it’s doing: reaching, pruning, persisting. Then ask yourself which branch in your own life needs growing, and which needs cutting.

These ideas come from In Trees: An Exploration by Robert Moor. Robert is a bestselling author and journalist whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Outside; his first book, On Trails, won the National Outdoor Book Award. Read on for 6 of his big ideas.

Know someone graduating from college or high school? Give the gift of lifelong learning with a membership to the Next Big Idea Club.

1. Stay branchy.

While talking with a neuroscientist named Jeff Lichtman at Harvard, I learned that as a baby your brain has the most neurons it will ever have. The rest of your life is spent pruning away those neural connections, as your brain struggles to reduce cognitive clutter and make sense of the world. As we get older, psychologists say it becomes imperative to keep our brains branchy, by practicing new skills, learning new languages, and putting ourselves in novel situations. But I don’t think it’s quite enough to just putz around on Duolingo for a few minutes every morning.

I suspect that what really keeps the brain branchy is going out into the wild world and engaging with beings unlike yourself—be they human, animal, or plant. As Leo Tolstoy once wrote, life cannot be “lived for myself alone.” We are fundamentally ecological beings, and it is by engaging with that wild ecology that we, too, can keep our brains stubbornly, wildly alive. Some people do that by volunteering at their local homeless shelter, gardening, working on wildfire crews, or joining a climate protest. I did it by going to England and learning how to climb trees again with a barefoot eccentric named Ben Atkinson. I’ve been climbing trees ever since. My brain—and my soul—is all the better for it.

2. Genius is profligate and nonlinear.

A tree is born with three riddles to solve:

It grows upward, looking for a ball of light (the sun) that rolls around the sky all day.
It grows downward, looking for a more or less random distribution of water.
It grows outward, hoping to survive the unpredictable ravages of wind, fire, ice and pests.

As it struggles to solve these three riddles, it might seem like a tree is undertaking a process of trial and error—trying first this solution, then that one—but that’s not what’s happening at all. Instead, a tree solves the puzzle of its own existence through what might be called trials and errors, trying many things at once, ditching those that fail, and strengthening the ones that survive.

In the words of Italo Calvino, from the perspective of reductive beings like us, it can often look like it is only “through a chaotic waste of matter and forms that the tree manages to give itself a shape.” But this wild, unconstrained act of multidirectional and multivarious exploration is how the greatest breakthroughs are made. Computer programs and economic marketplaces routinely run these kinds of tree-shaped operations, testing out many options simultaneously, then allowing the better options to winnow out the less optimal ones in a Darwinian fashion. While writing his masterpiece, War and Peace, Tolstoy wrote thousands of pages, only to throw most of them away. If brevity is the soul of wit, then branchiness is the soul of genius.

3. Creation necessitates destruction.

A tree grows by branching out in all directions, but it survives because it prunes away all those branches that don’t help the tree thrive. One of the joys of writing this book was getting to spend a lot of time around bonsai professionals, who are masters at the art of pruning. From them, I learned the importance of being ruthless in paring away all those ugly, clunky things that most people allow to linger around out of sheer complacency.

“A tree survives because it prunes away all those branches that don’t help the tree thrive.”

Traditionally, bonsai artisans begin their careers as apprentices, whose masters guide them through harsh (sometimes even violent) criticism. Over time, the apprentice learns to be ruthless in addressing their own shortcomings, and, hopefully, to cherish their own strengths. That balance of self-love and self-scrutiny is the secret to creating something truly great.

This week's Book of the Day sponsor is Effective by Melissa Swift. The modern workplace feels increasingly impossible — work has intensified, chaos seems constant, and everything seems designed to make you feel incompetent. Swift, founder of Anthrome Insight, offers a refreshingly practical path: how to get your job done well without losing your mind. Drawing surprising lessons from professions where failure isn't an option — firefighters, air traffic controllers, ER doctors — this is a paradigm-shifting guide for anyone trying to do meaningful work today.

4. Outgrow simple binaries.

One of the many things I love about tree-thinkers is that they are emphatically resistant to the plague of reductive, black-or-white, binary reasoning. When faced with a sharp dichotomy, arborescent thinkers ask: instead of either/or, could the answer be both / and?

This was one of the great insights of the anthropologist Frans Boaz. Rather than dividing the world’s cultures into crude categories like civilized and uncivilized, he placed every society on its own branch of a grand Tree of Culture. Tree-thinking teaches us that many truths can be true simultaneously, and each can have value within its own context. Once you let your mind expand beyond the narrow confines of binary thinking, the world opens in radical and beautiful ways.

This edition of Book of the Day is sponsored by Shopify. Launch your business for just $1/month. Start selling today at shopify.com/nbi

5. Being deeply rooted means embracing deep relationships.

Native philosophers often say that one thing uniting nearly all Indigenous cultures, which is notably lacking from the modern Western worldview, is a quality they call relationality. Rather than carving the world into separate categories and packaging it into easily saleable products, Indigenous thinkers tend to emphasize the relatedness between things, and they place enormous importance on maintaining those relationships, like so many fungal threads connecting the roots of trees in an old-growth forest.

“Indigenous thinkers tend to emphasize the relatedness between things.”

A lot of people around the world are feeling hollow and adrift nowadays, and they go looking to fill that void inside of them, that lack of rootedness, by defaulting to counterfeit ideologies like ethnonationalism. But that’s a profound mistake. True rootedness is having a deep sense of relationality—to other people, other living beings, and the earth itself.

6. The meaning of life is to help living things flourish over time.

I know it sounds a bit grandiose to say that studying trees for a decade taught me the meaning of life itself, but in a way, it’s true. In the past few decades, a wide array of philosophers have converged on the word “flourishing,” which comes from the Latin for “to flower,” to encompass the goal of a life well-lived. I like that word, but what I like even better is a term the philosopher Donna J. Haraway has coined: “co-flourishing.”

That’s what trees in a forest do: they flourish alongside, and with one another, by balancing cooperation and competition. But unlike flowers, trees don’t just flourish briefly and then wilt. Trees flourish for centuries, or even millennia. Adding that element of deep time to the project of communal flourishing provides the missing piece that much of our current discourse is missing.

The future looks pretty dark right now, so it’s easy to throw your hands in the air and just live for today, especially if, like me, you don’t have any kids. But when you stand in front of a tree that’s a thousand years old, you can’t help but wish to see it live for a thousand more. That’s what I call “entering the ecology of time itself.” As the Apache philosopher Viola F. Cordova proclaimed, “There is no glorious ‘future’ out ‘there’ waiting for us to arrive. We build the future through our present actions.” So, let’s get out there and start building.

The Future Is Too Important to Leave to the Algorithms

Michael Kovnat — Sat, 23 May 2026 13:03:01 GMT

The Big Idea: Predictions aren’t just forecasts — they’re power plays. From ancient oracles to AI models, prophecy has always been less about the future and more about control.

Why It Matters: Algorithmic predictions now shape hiring, health care, and what you watch tonight. When we treat those predictions as facts, we hand over our freedom — and quietly turn possibilities into destiny.

Try This Today: The next time an algorithm, expert, or forecast tells you what’s coming, ask: Who benefits if I believe this? Then decide whether to comply — or defy.

These ideas come from Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future by Carissa Véliz. Carissa is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford’s Institute for Ethics and the author of Privacy is Power, an Economist book of the year. Read on for 5 of her big ideas.

Know someone graduating from college or high school? Give the gift of lifelong learning with a membership to the Next Big Idea Club.

1. Beware of prophets.

We tend to think about predictions as belonging to the realm of knowledge. It’s easy to forget that predictions are never facts, because the future doesn’t exist yet, and there can only be facts about what has already happened. At best, predictions can be educated guesses. But often, they are not even that; they are power plays in disguise.

King Louis XI kept an astrologer in court. One day, the astrologer predicted that a lady of the court would die within a week. She did. Louis was rattled. Either the seer had murdered the woman to prove his accuracy, or he was so prescient that his foresight could threaten Louis himself. The astrologer had to be murdered. The king ordered his servants that upon his signal, they were to throw the astrologer out the window.

When the astrologer arrived to meet Louis, the king asked him one last question before giving the signal: “Given your prophetic abilities, tell me about your fate; how long will you live?” “I will die three days before Your Majesty,” came the reply. Louis never gave the signal.

Did the astrologer find his answer in the stars? Of course not. He understood the power of predictions and used it to get himself life insurance. In a similar way, tech executives pontificating on the future of tech are doing marketing, not science. That’s also why politicians are betting on themselves in prediction markets.

Predictions come in many kinds, and forecasts about the social world are fundamentally different than those about things or natural phenomena. If you make a prediction about the weather, it won’t affect whether it will rain. But social predictions tend to bend reality toward them by changing expectations. That makes them dangerous—if we believe them and give them credence. If we show skepticism toward prophets and their predictions, they lose much of their power.

2. AI isn’t a truthteller.

Machine learning (the kind of AI most widely used today) and the technology behind large language models, is a prediction machine. It fills in the blanks where data is missing, making projections through statistical analyses based on the data it does have. As a statistical machine, it ventures plausible responses without having any certainty as to whether it’s right; that’s unwise.

In his Apology, Plato tells the story of how Socrates’s friend goes to visit the oracle at Delphi to ask whether there is anyone wiser than Socrates. The priestess responds that there isn’t. Socrates seems puzzled. How could he be the wisest, with so many other people well known for their knowledge and wisdom, while he knows that he lacks both?

“As a statistical machine, it ventures plausible responses without having any certainty as to whether it’s right.”

To solve the mystery, he goes around interrogating politicians, poets, and artisans. He found that those who claim to have knowledge either do not really know what they think they know or else know far less than they proclaim.

If Socrates was the wisest person in ancient Greece because he understood the limits of his knowledge, then large language models are foolish for the opposite reason: They don’t know what they don’t know. That also makes them the ultimate bullshitters.

Bullshit (I promise, it’s a philosophical term) is speech that is persuasive but detached from a concern with the truth. Large language models, as they are currently designed, are the ultimate bullshitters because they are designed to be convincing with no regard for the truth. They are designed to sound plausible, validate our opinions, and make us want to engage further—not to track the truth.

Even more serious versions of AI, for example, used to predict supply chain issues, can only work with the data they have. So be careful using AI to predict the future; at best, it can project past data into the future. But the future doesn’t always resemble the past.

3. Freedom thrives only when the future is unpredictable.

Democracy is the least bad political system that we’ve come up with, partly because it protects the freedoms and rights of citizens. Only when we don’t know what’s going to happen (e.g., who will win an election) do we have democracy. If we can predict what people will do, it’s not a sign of knowledge or the advancement of science, but of manipulation and tyranny.

The future is unwritten. When predictive accuracy about people increases, it is not because we are discovering their future but because we are determining what they will do. Attempts to predict human behavior are often also attempts to control it. As an extreme case, it is easy to predict where someone will be tomorrow if you put them in jail. If we’re able to accurately forecast people’s fates, we’re that much closer to turning human beings into things. That’s too high a price to pay for accurate predictions.

“If we’re able to accurately forecast people’s fates, we’re that much closer to turning human beings into things.”

That democracy is faltering at the same time as the rise of an increase in the use of predictions is not a coincidence. There is a correlation between ancient Rome’s obsession with divination and the fall of the Republic. The more people believed in imperial charts (the prediction that someone would become emperor), the less they trusted the power of the citizenry to run their ship. Democracy never returned to ancient Rome. And when ancient Rome fell, corporations died with it for a thousand years. We should learn from our ancestors’ mistakes.

In ancient Rome, some “predictions” were written after the fact. The prophecy that Augustus would be great was likely fabricated to legitimize his power after he had already achieved greatness. Earlier this year, a journalist was threatened by strangers to get him to change his reporting on the story of an Israeli missile strike in Iran because they wanted to win a $900,000 bet they’d made on a prediction market. Predictions put pressure on freedom and democracy.

This week’s Book of the Day sponsor is How to Not Know by Simone Stolzoff, author of The Good Enough Job. We live in a moment that demands certainty — from our careers, our politics, our personal lives. But Stolzoff argues that the most valuable skill in an uncertain world isn’t predicting the future, it’s learning to sit with not knowing. Through gripping stories and deep research, this is an essential guide to finding clarity in ambiguity. Praised by Daniel Pink, Cal Newport, and Charles Duhigg.

4. Uncertainty is where creativity and humor live.

Uncertainty means that your fate is not sealed and that you have a chance to shape it. To be successful—in life, business, and democracy—we need to get comfortable with not knowing what the future holds. Resolving uncertainty as quickly as possible surrenders our power to others who end up deciding our future. Spaces of indeterminacy are where creativity, innovation, and humor flourish.

Seinfeld didn’t start off as a successful sitcom. It decidedly wasn’t what people wanted to watch. Test audiences thought the show was weak. Luckily for Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, and for fans, one NBC executive championed the show, despite other people’s predictions.

The network used to give Jerry Seinfeld notes on how to make the show better, but the recommendations fit generic past sitcoms. Seinfeld would listen, nod, and then not follow their advice, “You almost knew that you were on the right track when people at the network didn’t like it,” Seinfeld said.

Seinfeld attributes the unique qualities of the show to it being written by people who had never made a sitcom before. They weren’t following rules, using the cookie-cutter mold, or repeating what others had done.

“Spaces of indeterminacy are where creativity, innovation, and humor flourish.”

An algorithm would never have selected Seinfeld, but it went on to become one of the most successful shows ever produced. The show was different. Nobody had seen anything like it. And predictive analytics don’t choose new, because they work with historical data, and there are no databases about the future. Part of what is brilliant about Seinfeld is that the comedy itself changed the audience’s sensibilities and sense of humor.

Don’t use an algorithm that will fit patterns of the past to make choices. Be bold. Innovate.

5. Build the future you want to see.

One way to avoid the tyranny of predictions is increasing your exposure to serendipity. The most important events in your life are likely to be the least predictable. Maybe how you got your job or how you met one of the most important people in your life was serendipitous.

Be open to the unforeseeable. Read widely. Talk with people vastly different from you. Allow luck to strike. Try activities that might seem out of character. Surprise yourself. Write a quirky book, film an unusual movie, redesign an everyday object from scratch. Explore the offbeat. Say hello to strangers; don’t let algorithms determine whom you meet. Send messages in bottles, and if you ever receive one, consider responding. Take strolls along the beach; you never know what the tide might bring.

Another way to avoid falling prey to the allure of predictions is to interpret them, not as facts, not as sealed fate, but as invitations for defiance.

“The most important events in your life are likely to be the least predictable.”

The boxing match between Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali in 1971 was branded the Fight of the Century because it was the first time that two undefeated boxers who’d won the world heavyweight title fought each other for that very title. In a press conference before the match, Ali forecasted a win: “I predict that when I meet Joe Frazier (…) this will be no contest,” he said. He wasn’t running probability numbers; he was trying to intimidate his opponent. It motivated Frazier to fight harder than ever and win; it was the great Ali’s first loss.

To defy a culture of prophecy is to stop worrying about predicting the future, as if it were a script to discover, and to get busy building the future you want to inhabit, writing the script for yourself. The future is what you make of it.

Yeah, But Can AI Do My Dishes?

Michael Kovnat — Fri, 22 May 2026 12:30:20 GMT

Three big ideas this week from the disorienting frontiers of technology. , CEO of The Atlantic, joins Rufus and Caleb to explain why machines are conquering cognition long before they tackle the physical world, and what that gap tells us about where AI is headed. Megan Garber, also of The Atlantic, makes the case that the internet has transformed who we are, and that we still have time to decide what kind of world it creates. And lays out why bolting AI onto old systems isn’t transformation — and what rewiring an organization to be truly AI-native actually looks like.

This Week on the Next Big Idea Podcast

When will AI empty your dishwasher?

Nicholas Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic and host of “The Most Interesting Thing in AI,” joins Rufus and Caleb to explain why the machines may master our minds long before they master our muscles — and what that gap tells us about where AI is headed. Along the way: why human podcasters still beat AI ones, how Nick learned to stop worrying and love open source, and where he’d point an infinite AI budget. Check out our conversation with Nicholas on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.

📦 Get the best nonfiction sent right to your door. Learn more at nextbigideaclub.com (use code PODCAST for 20% off).

Donna Jackson Nakazawa, Mind Drama: The Science of Rumination and How to Outwit Your Inner Defeatist

Book Bite of the Week

How is the internet changing us?

The internet is transforming human identity, relationships, and society in profound ways, and we still have the power to decide what kind of world it creates. Megan Garber is a staff writer at The Atlantic who writes about culture. She previously worked as a reporter for the Nieman Journalism Lab, as well as a critic for the Columbia Journalism Review. Check out five key insights from her new book, Screen People: How We Entertained Ourselves into a State of Emergency, on the Next Big Idea app.

This week’s Book of the Day sponsor is How to Not Know by Simone Stolzoff, author of The Good Enough Job. We live in a moment that demands certainty — from our careers, our politics, our personal lives. But Stolzoff argues that the most valuable skill in an uncertain world isn’t predicting the future, it’s learning to sit with not knowing. Through gripping stories and deep research, this is an essential guide to finding clarity in ambiguity. Praised by Daniel Pink, Cal Newport, and Charles Duhigg.

This Week on the Next Big Idea Daily Podcast

Is your business ready for AI?

Most companies are bolting AI onto old systems and calling it transformation—but Melissa M. Reeve argues that truly AI-native organizations require a fundamental rewiring from the inside out. Pick up a copy of her book on Amazon or listen to her big ideas on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

This edition of Book of the Day is sponsored by Quince. Refresh your spring wardrobe and get free shipping and 365-day returns at quince/com/nbi

🎉 Happy Publication Week! 🎉

The following Next Big Idea Club Must-Read authors got to celebrate the publication of their books today--congratulations to them all! 📖 Join us in reading and discussing these exciting new releases:

Nicholas Epley, A Little More Social: How Small Choices Create Unexpected Happiness, Health, and Connection

Bruce Feiler, A Time to Gather: How Ritual Created the World--and How It Can Save Us

Saira Hameed, Signals: The Hidden Power and Secret Language of Hormones

Stefanie O’Connell, The Ambition Penalty: How Corporate Culture Tells Women to Step Up―and Then Pushes Them Down

Jonathan Alpert, Therapy Nation: How America Got Hooked on Therapy and Why It’s Left Us More Anxious and Divided

Emily Durham, Clock In: No-BS Advice for Getting Ahead in Your Career (Without Losing Your Mind)

Your Company Isn’t Ready for AI

Michael Kovnat — Thu, 21 May 2026 15:15:07 GMT

The Big Idea: Most companies think AI transformation is about choosing the right tools. Melissa Reeve argues it’s really about redesigning the organization itself. The companies pulling ahead are rebuilding how decisions get made, how teams learn, and how work flows across the business.

Why It Matters: AI is accelerating faster than traditional organizations can adapt. A company that needs six weeks to approve a decision may soon be competing against one that can make a smarter decision in six hours. The gap between those organizations compounds quickly.

Try This: Ask yourself one uncomfortable question: If your company were built from scratch today around AI, what would you organize differently? Start there. The bottleneck usually isn’t the technology. It’s the operating system underneath it.

These ideas come from Hyperadaptive: Rewiring the Enterprise to Become AI-Native by . Melissa was the first VP of Marketing at Scaled Agile, a leading voice in the SAFe in Marketing space, and co-founder of the Agile Marketing Alliance. Read on for 5 of her big ideas.

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1. Your operating system was built for the last century, and it can’t run AI.

You can’t expect 21st-century results with an operating system built for the 20th century. However, is that there is a blueprint for getting from where you are to where you need to be.

Let me explain what I mean by operating system. Most companies are still running on operating models built for the industrial era. Strategy flows top-down through layers of approval. Work moves sideways through functional silos. Hierarchy slows decisions. Handoffs lose information. This was the correct design for a world that valued consistency over speed.

AI literally changes things. An organization that waits six weeks for a decision cannot compete with one that makes the same decision in six hours, with better data. Most leaders default to adding an “AI initiative” on top of the existing structure. With this approach, you end up with what Ethan Mollick calls the jagged edge: Some teams moving fast, while others remain stuck.

Think about the companies that didn’t survive the digital transformation: Blockbuster, Kodak, Nokia. None of them died because the technology wasn’t available. They died because inertia kept the organization in place. With digital transformation, companies had about a ten-year window to figure things out. With AI, that window is closer to eighteen months.

So, how do you get from the operating model of today to an AI-native way of working? Hyperadaptive provides a five-stage path. The model is research-backed, specific, and already being used by leading companies.

The companies winning with AI have replaced the operating system underneath them, including the way the people, processes and culture move together. There is a way to make these changes incrementally. You can start from where you are and bring the organization along, piece by piece.

2. AI doesn’t install itself.

In the 1990s, when personal computers showed up at work, we didn’t put a PC on everyone’s desk and say, “Go have fun.” We trained people. We changed processes. We rebuilt how work was done. With AI, somehow, we’re trying to skip these steps.

AI is like a piano. Anyone can walk up and start pounding the keys. That’s easy. But playing an actual song takes deliberate practice and guidance. AI is deceptively simple. The interface invites you in. However, the result you get without effort is mediocre. The result you get with the right structure and support can be transformational.

Brad Miller was Moderna’s Chief Information Officer during its AI transformation, and he said something that stuck with me. “90 percent of companies want to do generative AI,” he told me. “Only 10 percent succeed. The reason isn’t the technology. They haven’t built the mechanisms to transform their workforce.” That 10-to-90 gap is one of the most important numbers in this conversation.

Moderna is in the 10 percent. In early 2023, their CEO, Stéphane Bancel, stood before his executive team and proposed something that sounded impossible: Bring 15 new drugs to market in five years. A single drug typically takes 10 years to develop and costs upward of two billion dollars.

Bancel wasn’t asking his people to work harder. He was asking them to work differently, with AI as a coworker, strategic advisor, and accelerant. They stopped asking, “How does AI fit into our current way of working?” and started asking, “What’s the best way to work in an AI-powered world?”

Six months in, Moderna had reached 100 percent generative AI adoption across the organization. They did that by building the mechanisms. Training. Coaching. Process redesign. A culture that treated AI fluency as a core capability, not an optional skill. If you want AI to transform your organization, you have to invest in the same level of ongoing training, coaching, and time to practice you’d invest in for any other major capability.

3. Learning is a bidirectional flywheel, not a curriculum.

AI doesn’t stand still. The model your team trained on six months ago has been replaced twice. The prompts that worked in January won’t work in April. The use cases that were impossible to imagine last year are now table stakes. You cannot build a static curriculum for a moving target. So, forget the corporate training catalog. What you need is a learning arena, a place where people experiment, share, and build on each other’s experiments in real time.

PwC figured this out. They run something called prompting parties. Yes, parties. Cross-functional groups come together, work through real business problems with AI, and walk out having taught each other things their training department couldn’t have built a course around. The learning is social, specific to the work, and spreads faster than any LMS could carry it.

But peer learning on its own isn’t enough. You also need a mechanism to capture what people are learning and feed it back into the system. This is what I call a bidirectional AI learning flywheel. AI Activation Hubs are small cross-functional pods that operationalize AI within a function, run experiments, and capture what works. AI Leads, who are your internal champions and automation translators, carry that learning to the front lines so people can apply it tomorrow. And critically, the front lines push their own discoveries back up to the hubs, where they get refined, tested, and pushed out across the rest of the organization.

Learning, traveling in both directions, and compounding. Because AI itself is updating, the flywheel doesn’t only spread knowledge. It refreshes the knowledge as it goes. Organizations that create AI-powered learning loops to sense and respond in real time will lead the next decade. They are the ones who have built the infrastructure for people and AI to update each other faster than technology can change. If your AI training plan looks like a course catalog, you’re already lost. Build learning arenas. Build the AI flywheel. Make learning a system, not a syllabus.

This week’s Book of the Day sponsor is How to Not Know by Simone Stolzoff, author of The Good Enough Job. We live in a moment that demands certainty — from our careers, our politics, our personal lives. But Stolzoff argues that the most valuable skill in an uncertain world isn’t predicting the future, it’s learning to sit with not knowing. Through gripping stories and deep research, this is an essential guide to finding clarity in ambiguity. Praised by Daniel Pink, Cal Newport, and Charles Duhigg.

4. Move one dimension and you get random acts of AI.

Most AI initiatives are focused on tools. Pick the right model. Roll it out. Train people. Done.

The problem is that an organization is a system. When you change one part of a system without changing the others, you get isolated successes—what I call random acts of AI. Pilots that don’t scale. Teams that get faster while other teams stay stuck. Productivity gains that disappear the moment people try to coordinate across functions.

I spent a lot of years working in the transformation space. The Toyota Production System. Agile. DevOps. Every single one of them taught the same lesson. Progress stalls when you fail to move multiple dimensions in concert.

For AI, the book lays out nine dimensions you must move together. Here are three that almost nobody is touching:

Incentives. If your reward systems still pay people for being right rather than for learning fast, you will not become Hyperadaptive. AI work involves unknowns. People have to feel safe to try things that don’t work.

Decision rights. AI collapses decision hierarchies. A junior analyst with the right model can now make a call that used to require three layers of approval. If you haven’t rewired who decides what, you leave a lot of speed on the table.

How you organize. Functions versus value streams. Permanent teams versus dynamic ones. Most organizations were built around work as it existed 20, even 40, years ago. AI requires you organizing around the work as it exists now.

Organizations tend to move slowly and unevenly. The five-stage roadmap accounts for this. At each stage, you move the dimensions that are ready to move. They don’t have to move in lockstep, but the dimensions do have to be considered as a system. Let one dimension get too far behind, and it blocks progress in the other dimensions. Treat AI as a tool initiative, and you get tool results. Treat AI as a system to be reinvented, and you get organizational results.

5. History tells us where the jobs go, but who’s responsible for getting people there?

The World Economic Forum Future of Jobs report projects that 92 million jobs will be displaced by 2030. Jobs disappearing is what makes the headlines. And that number deserves to be taken seriously. What doesn’t make the headlines is that the same World Economic Forum projects that 170 million new jobs will be created in that same window. Net positive 78 million. The question isn’t whether work is going away. The harder question is where it’s going, and whether we’re paying attention.

History tells us where it goes. Electricity. Factory automation. DevOps. The introduction of personal computers in the workplace. Each of these revolutions followed the same pattern. People stopped doing the task by hand and began building, monitoring, and maintaining the systems that performed it. The jobs evolved. Some industries were hurting for a long time. The macro picture, every single time, was net positive growth.

Who is responsible for getting people across that bridge? The government? Individuals? Companies? Smart companies have already made that choice. They calculated the cost of firing one workforce and hiring another—not just the recruiting expense, which is significant, but also the institutional knowledge they’d lose, the customer relationships, and the cultural memory. Leading companies like Unilever recognize the cost of this displacement and are investing in upskilling and AI matching. They use AI to identify which existing employees can be reskilled for which emerging roles and make the investment. They’re treating it as strategy, the same way they’d treat any other long-term investment.

The pattern of where jobs go is clear. The data is on our side. And the companies that are choosing to take responsibility for their people are doing it for the same reason they make any other long-term bet: Because it pays off. AI is going to reshape the work. What’s up to you is whether you become the company that helps your people make that jump, or the company that loses them and then has to find them again after your reputation has taken a hit.

The Overachiever's Trap: Why Trying Harder Is the Thing Standing Between You and Peace

Michael Kovnat — Wed, 20 May 2026 14:31:19 GMT

The Big Idea: Trying harder isn’t a virtue. Often, it’s a trap. The relentless pressure to do more, be more, and never quit isn’t a path to the dream life. It’s a path to burnout, self-erasure, and a life spent chasing a mirage.

Why It Matters: We inherited a story: winners never quit. That story has a cost, and most of us are paying it quietly.

Try This Today: The next time you catch yourself thinking, I should be doing more, pause and ask: Who taught me that? Was it actually your own desire—or a standard you absorbed from social media, work culture, family expectations, or the general pressure to “have it all”? Sometimes the first step toward self-acceptance is simply noticing which expectations were never really yours to begin with.

These ideas come from How to Stop Trying: An Overachiever’s Guide to Self-Acceptance, Letting Go, and Other Impossible Things by . Kate is a novelist, journalist, and New York Times bestselling ghostwriter who has written for Elle, Cosmopolitan, Women’s Health, and Shape, among others. Read on for 5 of her big ideas.

1. Trying, and trying again, is killing us.

Gen X and millennial women were raised to believe that all we had to do to “have it all” was try. This messaging has gone into overdrive in the last couple of decades with the ubiquity of social media and the rise of influencers. Everywhere we look, we are being told that if we want it bad enough and are willing to do whatever it takes, then our dream life is within reach. But making your dreams come true isn’t just a matter of work. It’s also a matter of circumstance, opportunity, luck, and a million other things outside of our control.

However, this is rarely acknowledged by those encouraging us to just keep going. So, we blame ourselves for not being able to achieve the perfect life that we’re told is possible. No matter how hard we’ve tried or how much we’ve worked, we assume that it has not been enough. For me, this hit full force when I was trying to have a second child. Over the course of three years of trying, I went through multiple miscarriages and failed fertility treatments. I was growing depressed, and the cycles of hope and disappointment were making it hard to enjoy the rest of my life. I was so focused on what I wanted that I couldn’t appreciate what I had. And yet, when I decided to stop trying, a lot of people couldn’t understand this: I hadn’t exhausted all of my options, so why didn’t I want to keep going?

As a kid, one of the first life philosophies I was ever exposed to was that winners never quit and quitters never win, so I became that kitten clinging to a branch. I hung in there, no matter what. I white-knuckled my way through life because I was scared that quitting would mean I was weak. This isn’t a path to your dream life. This is a path to burnout and exhaustion.

If we want to enjoy life and pursue what really matters to us, we have to make perseverance a choice, not a habit. We have to stop trying so hard at everything and reserve our trying for things we really, truly care about. This means that sometimes we have to quit. We have to stop being the kitten and learn to let go.

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2. Internalized misogyny is messing with your head.

Living in a misogynistic society has taught us that certain types of women, and certain characteristics in women, are more valuable than others. From early on, we’re told that these are the types of women that matter: nurturing women, caregiving women, selfless women, nice women, pretty women, and thin women. We learn to tamp down everything about us that doesn’t fit into these molds because we want to matter, too. As a result, so much of our trying isn’t even about trying to achieve or succeed. It’s just about trying to be who we think we should be, instead of letting ourselves be who we are.

Misogyny has given us fat-shaming, victim-shaming, slut-shaming, mom-shaming, and a whole cornucopia of other socially acceptable ways to keep women in line. The real tragedy is that we internalize all of these and turn this lens of judgment on ourselves. No matter how good we are, we’ll probably never feel like we’re quite good enough. Career women are particularly susceptible to internalized misogyny because we’ve been told that so many of the attributes necessary for success—assertiveness, advocating for yourself, ambition—aren’t feminine traits. The irony is that, even as we’re failing to have it all, we still feel guilty for trying in the first place. We feel like our careers aren’t something we can be proud of. Instead, they’re something that we need to make up for.

“Even as we’re failing to have it all, we still feel guilty for trying in the first place.”

When I became a mother, I felt like I had to try extra hard to be perfect, because the fact that I had a career I cared about meant that I already had one strike against me. This wasn’t just in my head—I’ll never forget that when I was looking for childcare so that I could keep writing, a female relative reminded me that some women write when the kids are in bed. Also, when we see career women portrayed in pop culture, their career is presented as merely a misguided attempt at a meaningful life. The 1987 classic Baby Boom is a prime example of this—no coincidence it was one of my favorite movies growing up—but you can also see this in contemporary films like Babygirl, which imply that women only become professionally ambitious because some other part of their life is lacking. As a result, many of us harbor shame about our careers, which only makes us try harder at work and home to make up for it. There’s no magic laser gun that vaporizes internalized misogyny, but the more we become aware of it, the less we allow it to drive us to keep up with impossible expectations.

3. Productivity is patriarchal, and that’s a problem.

Our culture is obsessed with getting more done, and we are told that the key to happiness is figuring out how to do more. But our productivity problem isn’t that we need to do more. Our productivity problem is that there is too much to do.

This is especially true for women. Over the past couple of generations, as our culture has shifted to put more responsibility on women outside the home, duties inside the home have not shifted to make up for that. More than three-quarters of women in the United States between the ages of 25 and 44 work outside the home, yet women still do two and a half times the unpaid labor as men. This is part of the paradox of being a woman in the 21st century. We’re constantly being told that our unpaid work—nurturing and caregiving—is our most important work, yet this same work is consistently diminished because it is unpaid. Capitalism only truly values what makes money, which is why even in 2025 you’ll hear people say, “Yeah, but what does she do all day?” when talking about a stay-at-home mom.

Productivity is a trap. It’s a game we can’t win. Emphasizing productivity leads us to prioritize quantity (getting as much done as fast as possible) over quality (enjoying ourselves while we do something meaningful), and we end up feeling like we’re missing out on our lives.

We have to get comfortable with the mess of letting things go undone and confront the gender biases that have loaded our to-do lists. We also have to stop praising men for doing the bare minimum. Just because he is not lying down in front of her car when she tries to drive to work in the morning does not mean he is being supportive.

This week’s Book of the Day sponsor is Big Time by Laura Vanderkam. Most of us treat time like a scarce resource to be hoarded and optimized. Vanderkam — author of seven time-management books — argues for a radically different approach: time abundance. Drawing on a decade of personal time-tracking and research into hundreds of real people’s schedules, she reveals simple, tested tactics that can transform how each hour feels. Praised by Cal Newport, Charles Duhigg, and Mel Robbins.

4. Acceptance isn’t settling.

We live in a world of more and better, where we’re taught that we should always be trying to do better, be better, and have more. We think we should never let ourselves get comfortable with who we are or what we have because that might mean we are settling for less. We’ve been taught that anything less than perfection is settling, so we think we can only accept something if it is perfect. This belief applies to ourselves.

However, acceptance isn’t a declaration of perfection, it’s simply acknowledging something for what it is and deciding to no longer devote time and energy to trying to change it. When you accept something, you admit to yourself that perfection does not exist, so there’s no point in holding out for it. When you settle, you tell yourself that perfection does exist, just not for you, so you’d better take whatever old crap you can get. Acceptance is abundance, and settling is scarcity.

“You are allowed to be who you are. You are allowed to have flaws.”

As long as you fear acceptance means settling, you will continue trying to be someone else and have something different. More often than not, when you’re trying, you’re buying. This is why motivational influencers are always telling you not get too comfortable. This isn’t because comfort is bad for you. Comfort is bad for them, because if you get too comfortable with yourself, then you’ll stop buying their online courses that promise to make you into someone different. You are allowed to be who you are. You are allowed to have flaws. You are allowed to be human. Yes, even if you’re a woman. There is no better person for you to be than the person you are, and there is no better life for you to live than the one you have. It’s not settling to believe this.

This edition of Book of the Day is sponsored by Incogni. Protect your personal information online and get an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan at incogni.com/nbi

5. It’s not bad to feel good.

Women are constantly being sold things that are supposed to make them feel better and make their lives easier, and the assumption behind these messages is that we feel bad and that our lives are hard. Even though they are often correct, this messaging teaches us that it is normal to feel bad about ourselves. After a while, we start to feel that it is dangerous to feel good because doing so might leave us out of step with our peers. Think of the iconic scene in Mean Girls, where Cady Heron commits the huge faux pas of thanking someone for a compliment rather than vehemently denying it. Yeah, Mean Girls is a satire, but it’s funny cause it’s true. When I was growing up, a popular slumber party game was to sit in a circle and each say something we hated about ourselves. It was literally a competition to see who found themselves the most deplorable.

Women are often taught that self-deprecation is a form of politeness (as a million pop songs will tell you, the good woman is a humble woman who doesn’t know she’s beautiful), and we also use it as a defense. We point out everything that is wrong with us because we don’t want someone else to do it first. However, while this behavior might start as a way to fit in, after a while, we begin to believe what we’re saying: that we’re too fat or too old, our house is a disaster, and we can’t do anything right.

It is a great and evil irony that we live in a world that tells us that the more we hate ourselves, the more lovable we become. But we can decide to love ourselves despite the consequences. Self-love and compassion is where we can try harder. We don’t have to think we’re the best. We just have to stop believing we’re the worst.

Why Grown-Ups Need Playtime Too

Michael Kovnat — Tue, 19 May 2026 18:06:15 GMT

The Big Idea: Playfulness isn’t about acting childish. It’s about staying curious, flexible, and emotionally alive—even when life gets messy. In a culture obsessed with productivity and polish, choosing play can be a surprisingly radical act.

Why It Matters: Most of us think of play as something reserved for vacations, weekends, or children. But according to Refinery29 cofounder Piera Gelardi, playfulness is actually one of the best tools we have for handling stress, unlocking creativity, building connection, and staying resilient.

Try This Today: Turn one ordinary moment into a tiny experiment in play. Take a “wonder wander” with no destination. Ask an unexpectedly curious question in a meeting. Celebrate a tiny win like you just scored the game-winning touchdown. Or simply notice the next time you’re white-knuckling through a situation—and ask yourself: what would the playful way look like instead?

These ideas come from The Playful Way: Creativity, Connection, and Joy Through Everyday Moments of Play by . Piera is a creative entrepreneur who co-founded the media brand Refinery29 and, more recently, the creative wellness company NoomaLooma. Read on for 5 of her big ideas.

1. Pressure narrows. Play opens.

When life throws a curveball, you must choose between taking The Pressured Way or The Playful Way. The Pressured Way is often our default: tense up, try to get control, force the solution. The Playful Way approaches the same situation with curiosity, levity, and openness. It’s the difference between white-knuckling through life and seeing it as an adventure.

Think about the last time you were really stuck, be that attacking a problem from the same angle, a hard conversation you kept dreading, or a decision that felt impossible. The more pressure you applied, the smaller everything felt. That’s not a personal failure. That’s just what pressure does. It narrows your thinking, tightens your options, and puts you in survival mode.

Play does the opposite. Think about the last time someone cracked a joke in a tense meeting, and suddenly the whole room shifted. Or when someone asked a genuinely unexpected question and new possibilities opened that weren’t visible a moment before. The Playful Way reorients situations to a position of curiosity instead of control, openness instead of force, and fluidity instead of rigidity.

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2. Playfulness makes seriousness bearable.

We’ve all absorbed some version of these messages as we grew up: be serious, get focused, act your age. We’ve been taught to think play is for kids, for weekends, or for after you’ve earned it.

When my company, Refinery29, was growing and we began hiring more corporate people, I started hiding my natural playfulness. I thought that to be taken seriously as a leader I needed to sand down the parts of me that were curious, irreverent, and imaginative, that those qualities had no place in a serious business.

“We’ve been taught to think play is for kids, for weekends, or for after you’ve earned it.”

In this mindset, I slowly suffocated. From the outside, it looked like I had reached a splendid career high, but I was spending nights lying on my apartment floor crying and making lists of all the ways I was failing. I was overworked and under-played—spectacularly, chronically under-played. Cutting myself off from playfulness hadn’t made me more professional. It had cut me off from my resilience, my perspective, my joy for the work, and my ability to roll with challenges creatively.

When I reconnected with play—brought it back into the office, back into how I led, back into how I thought—I became more resourceful, more connected to my team, and I wanted to show up for work again. That has been true not just in work but across my whole life. I live with depression, anxiety, and ADHD, and play has been one of my most powerful tools for working with them rather than against them. Instead of bracing and fighting, play gives me a way to stay fluid, curious, and connected to myself, even on hard days.

3. Discover your powers of play.

One of the most common things people tell me is, “I’m just not a playful person.” When I ask what they mean, they almost always say that they’re not silly. They’re not performing funny impressions at the dinner table or turning meetings into a comedy set. But silliness is only one tiny corner of play.

Playful people come in many forms:

The Mundane Alchemist—someone who makes every mundane errand feel like an adventure. They transform daily life with reframes and games.
The Curious Quester—the person who asks the question in a meeting that suddenly opens everything up. Their form of play is intellectual exploration.
The Mover and Shaker—someone who can’t sit still when they’re excited and who thinks with their whole body.
The Joyful Jester—the person who cracks a joke in a tense moment and shifts the entire room.

These are four of the eight Powers of Play. Each one is a distinct mode of creative aliveness. When you’re living in yours, people feel it. You become magnetic. Your authenticity shines.

Some powers will come more naturally to you than others, but they’re each like muscles that you develop with practice. You’ll likely find that you draw on different powers in different situations.

This week’s Book of the Day sponsor is Big Time by Laura Vanderkam. Most of us treat time like a scarce resource to be hoarded and optimized. Vanderkam — author of seven time-management books — argues for a radically different approach: time abundance. Drawing on a decade of personal time-tracking and research into hundreds of real people’s schedules, she reveals simple, tested tactics that can transform how each hour feels. Praised by Cal Newport, Charles Duhigg, and Mel Robbins.

4. Playfulness is a practice, not a vacation.

We tend to think of play as something we do when life slows down—on vacation, on weekends, or after we’ve finished the hard stuff. But it’s in the texture of ordinary days that playfulness has the most power to transform your life.

“The more you layer play into the ordinary moments, the more resilient, creative, and alive you feel.”

I’m not talking about big time-outs. I’m talking about small, deliberate moments woven into the fabric of your day. When I’m feeling anxious and wound up, I do a two-minute shake break in which I shake my whole body wildly like a wet dog, and it interrupts the spiral every time. When I’m feeling stuck or low, I go on a Wonder Wander—a slow, sensory walk where I’m not trying to get anywhere, just noticing and delighting in what’s around me. When something goes wrong, I try to find the funny—not to dismiss the difficulty, but to find the pinhole of light in it.

These aren’t frivolous. They’re how I stay connected to myself, find solutions, and tap into joy along the way. The more you layer play into the ordinary moments, the more resilient, creative, and alive you feel.

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5. The P.L.A.Y. process.

Knowing you want to be more playful is very different from knowing how to shift states in the middle of a hard moment. So, I developed a four-step process called the P.L.A.Y. Process for moving from a pressured state to a more playful one:

P — Pause and Accept. Stop. Acknowledge what’s true right now, without judgment.
L — Lighten. Find one small way to reduce the weight of the moment, be that a laugh, a breath, or a moment of physical movement.
A — Activate Your Play Powers. Deliberately engage a specific power of play, whatever feels natural to you.
Y — Yes-And. Work with what’s in front of you instead of fighting it. Say “Yes this is happening AND I can handle it the Playful Way!”

I used this recently while standing in an airport security line. The line was chaos. People were huffing, puffing, and emanating frustration. My flight was in an hour, and the checkpoint felt miles away. I could feel myself getting pulled into collective misery.

I chose to Pause and Accept: I stopped and acknowledged that I’m in a slow line and feeling stressed.

Then I Lightened: I took a big, loud breath and caught my partner’s eye.

Next, I Activated my Play Power: I deliberately chose to lean into levity and raised my hand for a high five. “YES! One turn closer!” I cried. My partner looked confused, then grinned and slapped my palm.

And then I said Yes-And: I chose to work with what was happening, the playful way. With each turn, I celebrated our micro progress. By the third zigzag, a family with a toddler was holding up their hands before we could even offer ours. A pocket of genuine laughter had formed in our section of the line.

Nothing changed. We were still late. The line was still long. But the entire experience transformed from stress to humor and from isolation to community. That’s the P.L.A.Y. Process. It’s not about waiting until conditions are perfect. It’s a tool for finding the playful way in the middle of the mess.

Your Fear of Strangers Is Holding You Back More Than You Know

Michael Kovnat — Mon, 18 May 2026 13:01:32 GMT

The Big Idea: Most of what stops us from talking to strangers exists only in our heads, and the cost of staying silent is higher than we realize.

Why It Matters: We’re living through an epidemic of disconnection. Casual conversation with strangers turns out to be one of the cheapest, easiest tools we have to feel more seen, more trusting, and more alive to possibility.

Try This Today: Next time you’re waiting somewhere—a line, a bus, an elevator—make eye contact and say something simple to someone beside you. The bar is lower than you think, and so is the risk.

These ideas come from Once Upon a Stranger: The Science of How “Small” Talk Can Add Up to a Big Life by Gillian Sandstrom. Gillian is an Associate Professor in the Psychology of Kindness at the University of Sussex, whose research on social interaction has been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic. Read on for 5 of her big ideas.

1. It’s natural to feel nervous, but you’re more worried than you need to be.

Although we tend to think we’re better than average in most ways—we think we’re a better driver, more honest, etc.—we don’t think we’re better than average when it comes to social skills, like having a casual conversation at a dinner party. It’s not just you, and that’s comforting.

As a kid, I found it super embarrassing that my dad loves talking to strangers. I worried specifically that he would make people nervous, that he’d bother people, and that people wouldn’t want to talk to him. Over the years, I’ve asked a lot of people about their worries. It turns out that people worry about so many things:

What if it’s boring?
What if they don’t want to talk to me?
What if they think I’m hitting on them?
What will they think of me–isn’t it against the rules?
What if I can’t figure out what to say?

Some of these things might happen sometimes. I’ve been stuck on a train listening to someone complain about their work. I’ve tried to strike up a conversation, only to have the other person plug in their earbuds. I’ve tried to crack a joke that was met with confusion. But these things don’t happen very often, and when they do, they don’t feel as bad as we fear, and the bad feelings don’t last for very long.

I’ve lived to tell the tale of my failures, and it hasn’t stopped me from trying again. We don’t love every meal or every TV show, but we don’t stop trying new restaurants. We still watch the next show that everyone is talking about. Some conversations are unfulfilling, but I pay the price because I know that many more will be interesting, useful, or meaningful.

Whatever your worries, the research is extremely comforting:

Rejection happens far less often than you might imagine. In one of my research studies, only 40 percent of people thought they’d be able to strike up a conversation with the first person they approached, but 90 percent were successful.
People like us more than we think—a phenomenon referred to in the research as the “liking gap.”
We worry more than we need to. In study after study, after people have a conversation with a stranger, they are forced to admit that none of the things they had worried about had come true.
Most of the time, after people get over their initial confusion about why a stranger is talking to them, they are happy to chat, and we tend to have a pleasant conversation.

When I started doing my research, I wanted to understand people’s fears and then figure out a way to reduce them. I thought: If there are barriers between you and your goal, then you focus on how to break down the barriers. But in this case, the barriers are ones we’ve created in our heads.

We don’t need to break down the barriers after all. Mark Twain said, “Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear; not absence of fear.” If we can find a way to muster a tiny bit of social courage, then we can talk to strangers in spite of our fears.

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2. You can learn how to talk to strangers—even if you’re an introvert.

Talking to strangers takes a bit of confidence and social skills, but it’s not complicated. You already talk to people all the time. We can experiment and learn what works for us and, like other skills, talking to strangers gets easier with repeated practice. We can’t all expect to immediately be as skillful at it as my dad. We can learn:

How to choose people and situations that make it a little easier.
How to start a conversation—maybe a question, comment, or kind gesture.
How to help make it easier for others to start conversations with us.

There are baby steps we can take to work our way up to talking if we’re not ready yet, starting with maintaining eye contact, paying attention to others, and visualizing a pleasant conversation.

I know people can learn because I ran a research study where people played a talking-to-strangers scavenger hunt. Every day for a week, participants had to practice talking to strangers, completing missions like “find someone who’s drinking a coffee” or “find someone who’s wearing a hat.” After a week of repeated practice, people were less worried about being rejected, and they were more confident in their conversational skills. Practice makes progress.

3. There’s so much to gain from talking to strangers.

When I was a kid, I couldn’t figure out why my dad was always talking to strangers. What did he get from it? Now I understand:

It’s fun. It adds a spark of novelty and richness to life.
It makes us feel seen, which is crucial for well-being. One day, I was walking in my local green space, stuck in my own head, holding back tears. Then, a lady pushing a baby carriage smiled at me. I didn’t instantly feel better, but her smile interrupted my negative thought spiral, and a small shift happened inside me.
When we talk to people, we learn. Maybe we learn random fun facts, or helpful information like directions or new opportunities.

When you talk to a stranger, you plant seeds that might grow into a new acquaintance or friend, a new client or business opportunity, or a new path that could change your life. Strangers model possibilities that we may not have considered.

I’ve had a few boring or slightly uncomfortable conversations and lots of unmemorable ones, but I’ve also had so many that have been enjoyable, valuable, and meaningful. A few conversations have even changed my life. One contributed to me changing careers (I used to be a computer programmer). A conversation on the Tube in London contributed to my taking up cello lessons. And, of course, my husband used to be a stranger.

This week's Book of the Day sponsor is Big Time by Laura Vanderkam. Most of us treat time like a scarce resource to be hoarded and optimized. Vanderkam — author of seven time-management books — argues for a radically different approach: time abundance. Drawing on a decade of personal time-tracking and research into hundreds of real people's schedules, she reveals simple, tested tactics that can transform how each hour feels. Praised by Cal Newport, Charles Duhigg, and Mel Robbins.

4. Learning how to talk to strangers pays off in unexpected ways.

When you talk to strangers, you:

Become more comfortable with rejection. You’re a little more likely to think “what’s the worst that can happen?” Talking to strangers has helped me do things like ask a LinkedIn contact to introduce me to someone and ask a potential employer for a meeting to learn more about a job I wanted to apply for.
Become more comfortable with uncertainty. It’s impossible to know how a conversation with a stranger will go. This is both scary and exciting! Talking to strangers helps you stay open to curiosity instead of closing off in fear.
Start to think more positively about other people. I walk around the world differently now, feeling safer, happier, and more trusting of others. This gradual change in outlook has been, for me, the biggest benefit.
This edition of Book of the Day is sponsored by Shopify. Launch your business for just $1/month. Start selling today at shopify.com/nbi

5. Talking to strangers puts some good into the world.

Research finds that people are kinder than we think. It’s easy to underestimate others’ kindness because people aren’t as kind as they’d like to be. They—we—worry about kindness being misconstrued or about it being awkward—for the recipient and us.

Kindness between strangers can be simpler than kindness between people who are acquainted. When you’re kind to a stranger, your motivations are clear. You’re not currying favor; you won’t see them again, so their opinion of you doesn’t matter. You’re not looking for them to return the favor in the future. When you’re kind to a stranger, it’s clear that you’re simply doing it because you want to put some good into the world.

It’s possible to be kind to a stranger without talking to them: you can let a car pull out ahead of you on the road or hold the door open for someone. But generally, to be kind—to offer a compliment, or directions, or assistance—you need to talk, at least a little bit. And so, learning to talk to strangers allows you to be more kind.

It’s so simple. It doesn’t cost anything. It doesn’t take much time. Simply noticing and acknowledging a stranger—saying hello or making eye contact—is an act of kindness and humanity in our increasingly disconnected world.

The Case for Not Having All the Answers

Michael Kovnat — Fri, 15 May 2026 13:01:16 GMT

Most of us treat uncertainty like a problem to solve — something to push through, plan around, or eliminate as fast as possible. But what if that instinct is working against us? This week, three new books make a quiet but radical case for sitting with the unknown. argues that a tolerance for ambiguity is one of the most underrated skills in modern life. explores why real self-transformation is messier — and more costly — than self-help culture wants you to believe. And Margaret Cullen makes the case for equanimity: not emotional flatness, but the ability to feel everything without being capsized by it. What connects them is a counterintuitive premise — that the path forward often runs straight through discomfort, not around it.

This Week on the Next Big Idea Podcast

What if uncertainty isn’t such a bad thing?

You can run from uncertainty, but you can’t hide. The thing to do, says Simone Stolzoff, is to develop comfort with ambiguity and build tolerance for the unknown. His new book is How to Not Know: The Value of Uncertainty in a World that Demands Answers. Check out our conversation with Simone on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

📦 Get the best nonfiction sent right to your door. Learn more at nextbigideaclub.com (use code PODCAST for 20% off).

Josh Tyrangiel, AI for Good: How Real People Are Using Artificial Intelligence to Fix Things That Matter⁠⁠

Book Bite of the Week

What does real transformation look like?

Benoit Denizet-Lewis shares five key insights from his new book, You’ve Changed: The Promise and Price of Self-Transformation. Benoit is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, an associate professor at Emerson College, and a New York Times bestselling author. Check out his five key insights on on the Next Big Idea app.

This week’s Book of the Day sponsor is Inside the Box by David Epstein, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Range. We live in a world that prizes freedom and infinite choice, but Epstein argues that the opposite — well-chosen constraints — is what actually unlocks creativity, innovation, and personal satisfaction. With endorsements from Malcolm Gladwell, Adam Grant, and Angela Duckworth, this is a paradigm-shifting read for anyone feeling overwhelmed by too many options.

This Week on the Next Big Idea Daily Podcast

Are you equanimous?

There’s a word most of us don’t use nearly enough—equanimity—and Margaret Cullen says it’s the key to feeling fully alive without getting wrecked by every emotional wave that rolls through.

Pick up a copy of her book on Amazon or listen to her big ideas on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

This edition of Book of the Day is sponsored by Quince. Refresh your spring wardrobe and get free shipping and 365-day returns at quince/com/nbi

🎉 Happy Publication Week! 🎉

The following Next Big Idea Club Must-Read authors got to celebrate the publication of their books this week--congratulations to them all! 📖 Join us in reading and discussing these exciting new releases:

Melissa M. Reeve, Hyperadaptive: Rewiring the Enterprise to Become AI-Native⁠⁠

Isaac Fitzgerald, American Rambler: Walking the Trail of Johnny Appleseed⁠⁠

Trisha Muro, It’s (Just) Rocket Science: Exploring Physics Through Spaceflight Missions⁠⁠

Ric Bucher, Coachable: How the Greatest Performers Reach Their Highest Potential⁠⁠

Joanna Stern, I Am Not a Robot: My Year Using AI to Do (Almost) Everything⁠⁠

Alvin Roth, Moral Economics: From Prostitution to Organ Sales, What Controversial Transactions Reveal About How Markets Work⁠⁠

Simone Stolzoff, How to Not Know: The Value of Uncertainty in a World that Demands Answers⁠⁠

David McKean & M. Todd Bennett, The Flag Was Still There: A History of the American Experiment in Five Anniversaries⁠⁠

Forget Left vs. Right. Here's What Really Drives the Supreme Court

Michael Kovnat — Thu, 14 May 2026 14:27:40 GMT

The Big Idea: The Supreme Court isn’t the predictable, partisan institution it’s made out to be. Yes, the justices have ideologies, but what actually shapes outcomes is something far more complex: individual personalities, internal rivalries, institutional self-preservation, and a Court that consistently defies the left-right narrative the media has built around it.

Why It Matters: In an era of legislative stagnation, Supreme Court decisions have become more consequential than ever. But our simplistic narrative of “Republican” vs “Democratic” justices means we fail to predict case outcomes and misread the decisions when they come.

These ideas come from Last Branch Standing by . Sarah is an ABC News legal analyst, editor of SCOTUSblog, and co-host of Advisory Opinions, the nation’s top legal podcast. She previously served as director of the Office of Public Affairs at the DOJ and clerked for Judge Edith H. Jones of the Fifth Circuit. Read on for 5 of her big ideas.

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1. Doppelgangers.

Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch are as close to a twin study as the Supreme Court will ever have. They’ve led remarkably similar lives. They were both the sons of high-achieving mothers who had climbed the power structures in Washington, D.C., before there was even a women’s restroom in the Senate. They both went to the same high school—together. They worked as law clerks on the Supreme Court for the same justice, in the same term. The two spent a decade as circuit court judges, belonged to the Federalist Society, and were nominated to the Court within eighteen months of each other. They were both nominated by the same president with the seal of approval from the same conservative legal scholars.

But their jurisprudence is radically diverging. In 2025, Justices Kavanaugh and Gorsuch were on the same side in only 50 percent of closely divided cases. Justice Kavanaugh was more likely to agree with Justices Kagan, Sotomayor, Thomas, Alito, Barrett, and the chief than with Justice Gorsuch. Only Justice Jackson ranked lower.

They almost seem to repel each other. Trump v. Illinois—stopping Trump from federalizing the national guard in Illinois—was decided 6-3. Kavanaugh voted against the president, and Gorsuch voted in favor. But what’s fascinating is that they switched sides in Learning Resources—also decided 6-3, striking down President Trump’s worldwide tariffs. Now, Gorsuch voted against the president, and Kavanaugh voted in favor. Every other justice stayed put.

Since joining the Court, Justice Kavanaugh has been in the majority more often than any justice since at least 1953. To understand the Court, you have to understand Kavanaugh. And to understand Kavanaugh, you have to understand his mirror image, Justice Gorsuch.

2. Large language model overlords aren’t taking my job anytime soon.

Large language models are notoriously bad at predicting the outcomes of Supreme Court decisions. I fed a popular AI model the briefs from each case in the 2024-2025 term. It predicted unanimous outcomes in 21 percent of cases and 6-3 outcomes in 42 percent. The reality was almost the opposite: 42 percent of the cases were unanimous, and 15 percent were 6-3. With any sort of political valence, the AI tended to assume the outcome would be 6–3 along ideological lines, even though that is one of the least likely outcomes.

“Large language models are notoriously bad at predicting the outcomes of Supreme Court decisions.”

Why are LLMs so bad at this? Because these systems reflect our own thoughts back to us. And, as one study found, the use of terms like Democrat, Republican, liberal, and conservative in media coverage of the Court tripled from 1980 to 2023. As the authors noted, “It would be nearly impossible to read contemporary articles about the Supreme Court without getting the impression that it is just as political as Congress and the presidency.” So, it’s no wonder AIs think every Supreme Court case will be 6–3. It’s how so many of our pundits and news feeds think, too.

3. If you give a conservative a cookie, he’s going to want to overturn gay marriage.

After 40 years and so many false starts (O’Connor, Souter, Kennedy), conservatives finally got the Court they wanted. Or did they? On the one hand, it’s easy to see the last several terms as the apotheosis of the conservative legal movement: on guns, abortion, religious liberty, affirmative action, and voting rights. But there’s something odd going on under the surface. A “we will go here but no further” is hidden in many of the opinions from the high institutionalists—Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Barrett.

All the while, conservative litigators are acting like the mouse that got the cookie. Now they’d like a glass of warm milk and maybe a straw. But what conservatives have seen as a good start may in fact be the end of the road. How do we know conservatives have some bumpy roads ahead? Just look at which circuits the Court is taking cases from and which of those circuits are getting reversed.

Remember: When it comes to predicting the outcome of any given case the Supreme Court has decided to review, it is more likely than not that they took the case because four justices thought it had been incorrectly decided below. In data terms, the Supreme Court historically is going to reverse whatever the lower court did about 70 percent of the time. Right off the bat, that gives you better betting odds than any table in Vegas.

“The Supreme Court historically is going to reverse whatever the lower court did about 70 percent of the time.”

The Court used to grant review in the largest number of cases from the very liberal Ninth Circuit. But not anymore. As Americans perceive the Court as becoming more conservative, it is the most conservative court—the Fifth Circuit—that is seeing many of its cases taken by the Court. In 2025, the Fifth Circuit had ten cases reversed—more than any other circuit. The liberal Ninth Circuit had only four cases flipped in 2025.

This week’s Book of the Day sponsor is Inside the Box by David Epstein, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Range. We live in a world that prizes freedom and infinite choice, but Epstein argues that the opposite — well-chosen constraints — is what actually unlocks creativity, innovation, and personal satisfaction. With endorsements from Malcolm Gladwell, Adam Grant, and Angela Duckworth, this is a paradigm-shifting read for anyone feeling overwhelmed by too many options.

4. Ice luge tutorial.

At the end of the term, the justices’ clerks perform parodies of famous songs poking fun at the Court. All the justices attend the performances, but let’s just say some have a better sense of humor than others—so the clerks these days tend to go for more self-deprecating humor.

In 2025, “Defying Gravity” from Wicked was a hit when it became “Defending Companies” as clerks pondered what they’ll be doing in big law after they leave the Court. And then there was the hilarious Rule of Civil Procedure 60(b) skit about the grounds for relief from a final judgment. Maybe you had to be there.

Every Thursday, one chamber will host the clerk’s happy hour. Drinking games are prohibited these days. In the early days of the Roberts Court, one of the chambers procured an ice luge. If you aren’t familiar, neither was the chief justice when he heard about it days later. I like to imagine how awkward it must have been when he summoned one of his clerks to explain to him that an ice luge is a block of ice with a “track” that runs downhill. A clerk stands at the top of the luge with a bottle of liquor and pours. The clerk at the bottom gets a nice cold shot. An ice luge is not a tool amenable to appreciating fine spirits or sobriety. Once informed, the chief banned ice luges (again, can you imagine drafting that memo?).

“An ice luge is not a tool amenable to appreciating fine spirits or sobriety.”

But while hard liquor has technically been banned, anyone who needs a top off for their Coke knows which drawer to look in. (Just don’t tell the chief!)

5. What if Trump is Penguin to John Roberts’ Batman?

Back in 1941, Robert Jackson, famed attorney general, prosecutor at Nuremberg, and Supreme Court justice, wrote this about the institutional longevity of the Court:

In spite of its apparently vulnerable position, this Court has repeatedly overruled and thwarted both the Congress and the Executive. It has been in angry collision with the most dynamic and popular Presidents in our history. Jefferson retaliated with impeachment; Jackson denied its authority; Lincoln disobeyed a writ of the Chief Justice; Theodore Roosevelt, after his Presidency, proposed recall of judicial decisions; Wilson tried to liberalize its membership; and Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed to “reorganize.” It is surprising that it should not only survive but, with no might except the moral force of its judgments, should attain actual supremacy as a source of constitutional dogma.

But maybe it is not surprising at all. During President Washington’s tenure, the Court was a weak, barely noticeable branch. Our first Chief Justice Jay told John Adams that the Court lacked “the energy, weight and dignity which are essential to its affording due support to the national government.” Why? Because George Washington offered it nothing to counterbalance.

Chief Justice John Marshall was thrilled to have such useful adversaries as Presidents Jefferson and Jackson to prove the need for an independent judiciary in Marbury v. Madison and Worcester v Georgia. What if Trump—attacking the Court constantly—is doing Chief Justice Roberts a favor? Only time will tell.

How to Stay Steady When the World is Crazy

Michael Kovnat — Wed, 13 May 2026 13:42:45 GMT

The Big Idea: Equanimity is an undervalued state of mind. It isn’t calm detachment, it’s the capacity to feel the full weight of your life without being derailed by it.

Why It Matters: The algorithms are built to keep us reactive. The news cycle rewards outrage. But while modern life provokes strong emotions, most of us were never taught what to do with those emotions. Equanimity offers a third path — not suppression, not surrender, but a steadiness that makes it possible to genuinely engage with the world as it is.

Try This Today: The next time you feel hijacked by an emotion pause and ask yourself: How long am I going to stay here? You can’t always control the initial reaction. But you can start paying attention to the recovery time. That’s where equanimity lives.

These ideas come from Quiet Strength: Find Peace, Feel Alive, and Love Boundlessly Through the Power of Equanimity by Margaret Cullen. Margaret is a licensed psychotherapist and meditation practitioner with over 45 years of experience. She co-developed Compassion Cultivation Training at Stanford University School of Medicine and has taught contemplative practices to populations ranging from military spouses to cancer patients. Read on for 5 of her big ideas.

We just announced our Next Big Idea Club pick of the season: David Epstein’s Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better. Join now and get a copy of the book to read alongside other club members, an invitation to a live Q&A with the author, and other perks. As a bonus, join now and you’ll get a copy of Michael Pollan’s latest book as well.

1. Equanimity has been hiding in plain sight.

Equanimity shows up across traditions: Buddhism, Taoism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Stoicism, and secular ethics. Different languages and different frameworks point to the same human capacity. Equanimity isn’t exotic. It’s not something you have to import into your life. It’s already here.

Equanimity is basic to our nature. We share it with the natural world—it’s part of the same intelligence that regulates your body, keeps systems in balance, and moves every living organism toward homeostasis. It’s the ground we stand on, even when we don’t realize it.

What varies is not whether we have it, but whether we can access and cultivate it. And there are many ways in, including through:

· Faith traditions.
· Practices.
· Small cognitive reframes.
· Humor.
· Moments of awe.
· Communities that support and reinforce it.

You don’t have to get it perfect. It’s not a fixed state. It’s both a trait and a capacity that grows over time. Just by reading this Book Bite, your salience network has been primed toward equanimity, and it might just appear in that single moment when you need it most.

2. Equanimity is not indifference, passivity, apathy, or being calm.

This idea is one of the biggest misunderstandings. In truth:

· You can be excited and equanimous.
· You can be broken-hearted and equanimous.
· You can be fully engaged in the world, even fighting for change, and be equanimous. You can be calm, too. It’s just that equanimity isn’t only about being calm.

Think of Rosa Parks, sitting on that bus in Montgomery. Or the nineteen monks who walked for peace from Texas to Washington, D.C., in February of 2026—quiet, steady, and completely committed. Even their dog, Aloka, had over one million followers on social media. This is not disengagement. It’s the ability to stay present without collapsing or overreacting.

And this is where science is catching up. Psychologist Iris Mauss and her colleagues have found that people who try eliminating negative emotions—or relentlessly chase positive ones—are not healthier. They tend to have higher levels of anxiety and depression and lower well-being. Forcing ourselves to feel good doesn’t work.

Equanimity offers something different. It allows us to feel the full range of experience without dampening our zest for life. Because equanimity doesn’t come from feeling less. It comes from being able to feel more without getting lost in it.

3. Equanimity is about recovering more quickly from emotional reactions.

This is something scientists call affective chronometry—basically, how long does it take to return to baseline after you’ve been triggered. When I first encountered this in the research of Antoine Lutz and Richie Davidson, it surprised me. Highly experienced meditators (over 10,000 hours) weren’t numb emotionally. In many cases, they actually showed stronger initial reactions to provocative emotional stimuli than the rest of us.

But the difference is that they recovered faster. They didn’t stay stuck in the feeling. They didn’t ruminate. They didn’t spiral. And this idea has begun to appear in academic literature on equanimity. One early paper out of Harvard suggested that this capacity—how quickly we recover our balance—may be central to what defines equanimity.

So, equanimity isn’t about becoming unshakeable. It’s about becoming less sticky. You still feel everything—anger, fear, grief, joy—but you move through those states more fluidly. You come back more quickly and that changes everything because now the question isn’t, “Did I react?” It’s, “How long did I stay there?”

This week’s Book of the Day sponsor is Inside the Box by David Epstein, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Range. We live in a world that prizes freedom and infinite choice, but Epstein argues that the opposite — well-chosen constraints — is what actually unlocks creativity, innovation, and personal satisfaction. With endorsements from Malcolm Gladwell, Adam Grant, and Angela Duckworth, this is a paradigm-shifting read for anyone feeling overwhelmed by too many options.

4. Mindfulness and equanimity are both the same and different.

I began teaching Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction in 1996, so I’ve been engaged with how mindfulness unfolded in the West for three decades. And having worked closely with Jon Kabat-Zinn, I can tell you that mindfulness was never just about paying attention. It was about how we pay attention, and that “how” is equanimity. Or, as Jon would say, paying attention non-judgmentally.

When I interviewed meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg, I asked her to imagine a Venn diagram with one circle for mindfulness and another for equanimity. How much do they overlap? She said, “Completely.” In that sense, they’re the same. And at the same time, they’re different.

When you step outside the modern mindfulness movement and look across religious and philosophical traditions, you find equanimity everywhere—but not necessarily mindfulness as we define it today. In many religions, equanimity shows up as a kind of inner balance in the face of life’s ups and downs—the “worldly winds” of praise and blame, gain and loss.

When Moses Maimonides brought this idea into Jewish philosophy in the 12th century, he did it through a Sufi teaching, borrowing a story from a Sufi master. So, yes, equanimity is deeply embedded in mindfulness. It is also something that appears across many traditions, in different forms and languages.

This edition of Book of the Day is sponsored by Incogni. Protect your personal information online and get an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan at incogni.com/nbi

5. Is the world on fire?

It can feel that way. With the overlapping crises we’re living through, it’s hard not to reach for extreme language. Sometimes it feels like no amount of hyperbole quite captures the mess we’re in. And yet, the constant language of outrage and alarm doesn’t help. In fact, it knocks us off balance, narrows our perception, and gates our cognition.

This is reinforced by the algorithms that shape what we see. Anger and outrage generate more engagement, so those are what get amplified and travel faster. But when we’re caught in that loop, we lose access to the capacities we need most: clarity, discernment, and effective action.

I saw this up close in California in 2020. My part of the state was on fire. We had so many evacuation notices that our bags remained packed by the front door for weeks. But the entire world was not on fire, and that distinction matters. Equanimity doesn’t deny reality. It helps us see it more clearly.

I had a conversation with former Congressman Tim Ryan about this—someone who has been in the middle of more than a few political firestorms—and what we kept coming back to was that if we lose our balance, we lose our effectiveness. Equanimity is not a retreat from engagement. It allows us to meet a difficult world without becoming distorted by it.

The Skill Nobody Teaches You: How to Not Know

Michael Kovnat — Tue, 12 May 2026 12:53:25 GMT

The Big Idea: Uncertainty isn’t a problem to solve, it’s one of life’s inevitabilities. The people who handle it best don’t have more answers; they have better tools for functioning without them.

Why It Matters: We’re living through an era of compounding unknowns in our careers, our institutions, our technology, our politics. And yet our tolerance for ambiguity is shrinking. The gap between how uncertain the world is and how certain we demand to feel has never been wider. Learning to close that gap may be the most underrated skill of the moment.

Try This Today: Write down six “guiding principles” for your business, your relationships, or your life. While periods of uncertainty and crisis are unavoidable, a clear set of values can help anchor you.

These ideas come from How to Not Know: The Value of Uncertainty in a World that Demands Answers by Simone Stolzoff. Simone is an author and former design lead at IDEO whose work has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, and on the TED stage. Read on for 5 of his big ideas.

We just announced our Next Big Idea Club pick of the season: David Epstein’s Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better. Join now and get a copy of the book to read alongside other club members, an invitation to a live Q&A with the author, and other perks. As a bonus, join now and you’ll get a copy of Michael Pollan’s latest book as well.

1. Our brains are wired to fear uncertainty.

Picture a research study with two groups of participants. Group one was told they had a 50 percent chance of receiving a painful electric shock. Group two was told they had a 100 percent chance of receiving a painful electric shock. Who do you think would be more stressed?

You might assume group two—at least group one had a chance of getting off shock-free. But researchers from University College London found the opposite to be true. Participants who had a 50 percent chance of getting shocked felt far more stressed. It’s somehow more comfortable to expect the worst than deal with the worry of not knowing our fate.

In another study, researchers found that professional uncertainty takes a toll on our health similar to that of actually losing our job. We are biologically wired to avoid uncertainty. Think about it evolutionarily: if our ancestors heard a rustle in the bushes, but didn’t know the source of the sound, their uncertainty could have been lethal. But while avoiding uncertainty may have been adaptive in the jungle, today our discomfort with uncertainty can keep us paralyzed.

2. Find your anchors.

Certainty in some aspects of your life makes it easier to hold onto uncertainty in others. In your personal life, perhaps your anchors are a commitment to a person or a place. In your professional life, an anchor might be a commitment to your values or to serving a particular customer.

By clarifying the aspects of your business that will remain constant amidst all that is changing, you’ll be better equipped to navigate the unknown. A telling example comes from Airbnb. Brian Chesky, the founder of Airbnb, handled losing 80 percent of his business at the start of the pandemic.

Chesky knew the pandemic would be a period of unprecedented uncertainty for the company. So, one of the first things he did was create a list of six guiding principles for himself:

· Be decisive.

· Act with all stakeholders in mind.

· Preserve cash.

· Be the hero, not the villain.

· Overcommunicate.

· Win the next travel season.

“In a crisis, you have to make principle decisions, not business decisions,” he said, reflecting on what he learned from the pandemic. “A business decision is a decision you make, predicting the best possible outcome. A principle decision is irrespective of the outcome.”

Principles became Chesky’s anchors as he steered the company through an uncertain future.

This week’s Book of the Day sponsor is Inside the Box by David Epstein, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Range. We live in a world that prizes freedom and infinite choice, but Epstein argues that the opposite — well-chosen constraints — is what actually unlocks creativity, innovation, and personal satisfaction. With endorsements from Malcolm Gladwell, Adam Grant, and Angela Duckworth, this is a paradigm-shifting read for anyone feeling overwhelmed by too many options.

3. Focus on the next right action.

In How to Not Know, I profile a crisis management expert named Meredith who gets brought into organizations when things fall apart. One particular story she told me stayed with me. A large manufacturing firm called her after there had been an accident in their factory that led to several employees getting seriously injured. When she arrived at the company headquarters, the energy among the executives was frenetic.

There was so much to do. They had to issue a press release, communicate with investors, check in with injured employees and their families, conduct safety inspections at the factory, plan when to resume production, talk to their insurance provider, and meet with current employees. The list went on and on.

Meredith got a giant piece of butcher paper and rolled it out over the long boardroom table. One by one, she made a list of everything that needed to be done. Getting it out of the executives’ minds and onto the paper helped the team turn their tasks from amorphous anxieties into clear priorities.

When faced with uncertainty, it’s easy to be overwhelmed, but when we separate what we can and can’t control, it allows us to start making progress. Instead of worrying about all that is unknown, we can focus on one task at a time, which in Buddhism is often called “the next right action.” By taking one next right action at a time, clarity emerges through the fog.

4. Choose curiosity over fear.

One reason uncertainty can be so uncomfortable is because our brains have a natural tendency to catastrophize. It’s a hallmark psychological finding that losing something feels worse than gaining something feels good. So, our natural inclination is to brace for the worst. But while uncertainty can be scary, it is also the birthplace of possibility. Nearly every scientific discovery, world-changing business, and mind-expanding piece of art began with someone’s willingness to engage with the unknown.

In moments when we perceive uncertainty as a threat, blood flows away from our brain to our body as we prepare to either fight or flee. Yet when we see uncertainty as an opportunity to gather more information, we enter what psychologists call approach mode—our blood vessels dilate, increasing blood flow to our brain. The terminology is apt. When we see uncertainty as threatening, we retreat. But when we’re able to turn toward uncertainty, we approach a new way of thinking.

Though uncertainty can be uncomfortable, we can choose to approach what we don’t know with a sense of curiosity instead of fear. Uncertainty gives our lives texture. Without uncertainty, there would be no mystery, serendipity, or surprise. We can’t know exactly how our lives will go, and therein lies the magic.

This edition of Book of the Day is sponsored by Granola. If meetings are eating up your day, Granola is a no-brainer. You can try it totally free for three months. Just head to granola.ai/IDEA

5. Row through the fog.

In the early 2010s, the gaming startup Tiny Speck was a darling of the tech industry. The company had raised $17 million. The launch of its first game, Glitch, was covered by international media, including The Guardian and the New York Times. Within months of launching, it had tens of thousands of active players.

Despite the external signs of success, the founder had a sneaking suspicion that the company was not on the right path. So, he did something that others might’ve seen as insane. Less than two years after launch, with millions of dollars left in the bank, he decided to shut the game down.

But instead of calling it quits, the founder decided to lean into the unknown. He offered to make his investors whole, downsized the team, and, with the remaining employees, got to work on a product in an entirely different industry.

While developing the game, the team had built a prototype for an internal messaging tool to help them collaborate. The founder decided to go all in on the messaging tool. That tool, Slack, became one of the fastest-growing enterprise software startups of all time. And its founder, Stuart Butterfield, was anointed as one of Silicon Valley’s most visionary entrepreneurs.

“I would love to say that we knew all the answers in advance,” Butterfield said, thinking back to his decision to shut down Glitch. “But the truth is that we discovered our product and opportunity, rather than planning for it.”

The moral of the story isn’t that all’s well that ends well, though the fact that Slack sold to Salesforce for nearly $27 billion wraps the case study up with a bow. The moral is that unless we are willing to face uncertainty head-on, we’ll never discover the possibilities awaiting us on the other side.

Butterfield’s story reminds me of a metaphor I learned while working at the design agency IDEO: being a leader is like sitting in a rowboat on a foggy lake. You can’t see far ahead or know precisely where you’ll end up, but you have two jobs: to maintain faith that you’ll eventually reach land and to keep rowing.

Why Your Haircut Costs More Every Year (And Your TV Set Costs Less)

Michael Kovnat — Mon, 11 May 2026 12:59:02 GMT

The Big Idea: The economy isn’t a machine that someone controls. It’s an evolving system where prices carry information, technology reshapes work, and geography shapes opportunity more than most people realize.

Why It Matters: Your life can feel out of control when your paycheck feels smaller, your rent keeps climbing, and your job looks nothing like it did a decade ago. Understanding the forces shaping those realities is the first step to navigating them.

These ideas come from Planet Money: A Guide to the Economic Forces That Shape Your Life by Alex Mayyasi. Alex is a longtime NPR Planet Money contributor, founding editor of the James Beard Award–winning Gastro Obscura, and host of the new podcast Gastronomics. Read on for 5 of his big ideas:

We just announced our Next Big Idea Club pick of the season: David Epstein’s Inside the Box. Join now and get a copy of the book to read alongside other club members, an invitation to a live Q&A with the author, and other perks. As a bonus, join now and you’ll get a copy of Michael Pollan’s latest book as well.