Those cuisines are more than just their ingredients. They're collections of stories, histories, values, memories. When we start to learn something about one another's cuisine, we often discover something deeper. We are not as different from each other as we think.
And one thing about being a reporter is you're sort of always pulling yourself kind of away from a situation at like a sort of emotional remove when you're reporting on horrific events and I kind of did that with myself too. Sort of like watching myself because it's sort of like my Russian side that's going through this cuz it's all in Russian, you know? I see yeah I see myself on TV but I see Evan. And so it's this sort of like I'm observing him, this guy as much as anybody else is until right before when I find out that I'm going to be swapped.
I think Nora comes into this thinking that love and kindness and openheartedness and her wealth can almost lift Nathan, her adopted black son, out of race, right, into class.
understanding that all these people somehow are kind of my grandparents, are kind of the people that lived a life in a way so incomplete in order for me to have a life that is better than his. They risked their lives with trying to love and trying to fulfill their passion. And all those stories are silenced.
I feel like I spent the first decade of my career trying to seem normal and trying to seem palatable and trying to seem like I wasn't too much or too weird or too specific. And I think that the things about myself that I tried to hide are the things that now I'm trying to put at the center of the work.
I think that everyone who falls into this category of insecure overachievers is sort of doing that same that same thing trying to trying to get to the baseline, get up to the baseline on my best days. Now, it's something totally different. It's like, right, I feel good about myself. Things are fine. I don't have to do anything just to feel like I've earned my right to exist on the planet.
I think some essential part of me is still there. And here's the thing about terror, although it may well be true of grief, too. It robs you of so much. It steals your sense of yourself and your place in the world, and it murders time.
Being told all the way through your school years that you are somehow less than the rest of the people in your class must have had a devastating effect on her... How could you not feel that you were somehow inadequate? And it was only after she left school where she truly flourished.
It feels like a time capsule from a completely different era. Um, Mark Zuckerberg has so thoroughly reinvented himself that it felt like I was like, who is who is Jeremy Strong playing?
Scientists have found that your social class of origin plays nearly as large a role in shaping your identity as your race, gender, or sexuality. And that children become aware of their own social class standing just a little later than they become aware of their race and gender. In fact, kids as young as seven can, with outrageous accuracy, correctly identify somebody else's social class just by looking at a photo.
The water moved with such force and confidence, knowing exactly where to flow and how to go, and it seemed to declare, "Do not call this a comeback, I have been here for years."
I feel strongly that we are spirits having a physical experience. And I think it's just helpful for me to sort of locate how much I think a character is in conversation with his creator.
Everything I had done for the first 48 years was an attempt to earn my worth. Becoming a championship tennis player, starting multiple businesses, building Toms and becoming the poster child of conscious capitalism. I mean, there were the magazine covers, the stages, just like this one, the awards and the accolades because I believed that achievement would quiet that voice. Instead, it made it louder.
I left a place where I was not welcome, or cared for, or seen, and went to college. But it wasn't until I got to New York and found my people that I actually was like, oh, I can actually be this person. It's okay.
I am so enamored of my mother that it prevents me from being a mother. Like my mother was so large and all-consuming that I was like I am not going to even like replicate this. It's like any sort of like carpet weaver putting like a little error in it so as not to like test the authority of like Allah.
Every shelf in our library is like a little pocket universe, an interesting, almost voyeuristic glimpse into someone's heart and mind. And if you walk around our library, quite often you end up standing in front of a shelf thinking to yourself, "I think I know this person," even though, strangely, you've never met this person in your entire life.
I was born and raised in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria, holding temporary cards or ID cards. It was written on a temporary ID card for Palestinian refugees. Then when I fled to Lebanon, the same happened when I had to renew my residency every year because it was a temporary residency. So to be in the United States and for the first time in my life having, you know, something written on it permanent, it meant to me stability. It meant to me that I finally would have a chance to actually plan for more than next year or next month.
But where was home? Syria, where I was born but couldn't return to? Germany, where my family lived but I had no right to stay? Algeria, where I had a passport but whose soil I barely knew? America, which had given me a green card and then snatched me off the street? Or Palestine, the only answer that ever felt true, the only place that ever made sense, even though I had never set foot there.
The whole reason why I had become a novelist and wanted to tell stories was so that I could understand my family and honor everything that they had been through, and I kept putting off all these opportunities to sit down with my grandfather and hear his stories and interview him and record him and get all these details because I was just so embarrassed at where my Chinese was. I was too ashamed to speak up, and now I'll never get that chance.
And the years pass, and you continue to perform blackness for people in a way that is palatable, right? In a way that keeps everybody there and not walking out the door. And that is only something I can do for so long, you know.
I've been fascinated for years now by the idea of the counterlife. It's the life where you went to a different school or married a different person or never started working at NPR or never became a novelist or whatever whatever that inflection point was. And I think that if any of us look at our lives and think about those moments when we made one choice instead of another, if you kind of play that out a little bit, it's easy to imagine the life you didn't live.
Your videos are telling you who you are instead of you interacting with the content and kind of deciding. I think it can it can, as we've seen, really influence how people see themselves, how they see each other, and I ultimately think it can be really damaging to a lot of people.
We tend to think of big life changes as responses to crises — job loss, divorce, illness. But sometimes people blow up their lives not because something went wrong, but because everything feels too comfortable, too predictable, too safe. The very stability they worked so hard to achieve starts to feel like a trap.
I think that I was really ignoring my personal relationship with the cello. I think I was using the cello as a tool, trying to extract all the good that I could from it in a way that would make an impact for other people. But I wasn't really considering what does this sound, what does this practice mean for me?
I think that I was really ignoring my personal relationship with the cello. I think I was using the cello as a tool, trying to extract all the good that I could from it in a way that would make an impact for other people. But I wasn't really considering, what does this sound, what does this practice mean for me?
I saw how people would treat me when I'm by myself versus when my parents were there. And I also knew that our house wasn't one that talked about race or talked about issues or problems more broadly. And again, instinctively, as a black boy, I didn't think they would believe me.
The most successful people that I've ever worked for or interviewed, and I mean like some of the wealthiest people in the world, they're not people who said, "I've made enough money," but they're people who changed the measure and stopped just measuring themselves based on how much money they have.
Most of us are familiar with the pull of a fresh start. But researcher Kristina Olson has found something surprising: people who make dramatic life changes — who blow up their lives — often report higher levels of well-being than those who stay the course, even when the change involves significant loss and hardship.
If you can align and interconnect who am I, what I believe, and what I'm doing, if you can connect those three dots, your chance of meaning making goes way up. If you can't connect those dots, your chances of meaning making goes way down. You can't connect a dot you've not articulated.
Looking back, I think that I was really ignoring my personal relationship with the cello. I think I was using the cello as a tool, trying to extract all the good that I could from it in a way that would make an impact for other people. But I wasn't really considering, what does this sound, what does this practice mean for me?
People we don't actually know, and these can be people who in reality lead very, very messy lives. They can be lost, very conflicted people, and we still let them tell us what to do.
I just keep doing that with my books. my characters are getting older along with me. I guess I can remember reading books when I was younger about older women and thinking, isn't that interesting? They're still they still have a rich inner life. They're still people, still have relationships. And things still matter. They're not just sort of blobs.
I write in this book, sometimes you have to ruin your reputation to save your life. So, you know, I like people. I don't like putting on this front of, oh, I'm, you know, too busy to answer the phone. And so I didn't really listen to any of them because I was trying to listen to whatever this little heart of mine was trying to say.
Psychologist Anthony Klotz studies the "jolts" that shake us out of our routines, and how these moments can help us make more intentional decisions about the people we want to become.
To be your authentic self at work is um a level of like vulnerability and putting yourself forward when like you're sacrificing time with your family, with your community, mentally with yourself and these jobs expect so much from you, but you are ultimately disposable.
I guess I can remember reading books when I was younger about older women and thinking, uh, isn't that interesting? They're still they still have a a rich inner life. They're still people,
The mark of being part of the 'wrong group,' a peripheral group rather than a central one, is that nothing you do is right. And what's so interesting about not being able to win, and by conforming, is that you learn to do whatever you [expletive] well please.
Almost everybody that comes here has has a past, and they're always running to something, some are running from something, but mostly they're running to a future.
the gap between that public self and the messy vulnerability of our private selves is often huge, you know, and that's true whether you're talking about how your life is actually going versus the Instagram post you just got up, put up, or that you saw of someone else, or like how professional and put together you're seeming on a Zoom call when actually you're not wearing any pants, you know, just out of the frame.
We all feel that we have to perform this version of ourselves that knows the script, that, as you said, is commanding and decisive and desirable, the best public version of ourselves. We're performing that. But actually the gap between that public self and the messy vulnerability of our private selves is often huge.
Everybody sizing one another up as being fresher off the boat, more foreign and weird. These were critical determinations, often coming down to the strangeness of some kid's sneakers or shirt or haircut. I don't recall any of the sort of taunting and name-calling we had at the apartment complex, but there was patent discrimination.
Men are feeling unsatisfied or lonely and they see this kind of new hyper masculinity as a possible answer. And I think that's on some level it's more appealing because it's easier than you know introspection and you know self-reflection.
We we self-deprecate and we sort of downplay ourselves and our dreams throughout our life. Especially for people who grow up in marginalized communities and people who are not necessarily, you know, born and raised here or people who come from immigrant or refugee families and it's time to sort of reclaim ourselves and our dreams and our narratives.
2mo ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
