A World With No Up or Down Imagine living in a world containing only two dimensions: length and width. There is no height, no above, and no below. Everything exists on a completely flat surface where circles, squares, triangles, and other shapes move around. The inhabitants live their entire lives without ever imagining that another
Flatland: What If Reality Is Bigger Than What I Can See? Read More »
Why Good Intentions Are Not Enough I have reached a point in life where I understand that wanting something good to happen and creating the conditions that allow it to happen are two different things. I can hope for stronger families, safer communities, better schools, economic opportunity, racial justice, peace, and equality. I can pray
Pray, Then Move: When Faith Must Become Action Read More »
The Mathematics of Friendship One of the more interesting studies I have encountered about friendship came from Jeffrey Hall, a researcher at the University of Kansas. He wanted to understand something most of us experience but rarely try to measure: how much time does it actually take for one person to become a friend? His
Friendship Takes Time: Why Showing Up Matters Read More »
A Face and Voice We Already Knew Sometimes an actor plays a role so well that the character becomes part of our cultural memory. We may remember the character long before we remember the actor’s name. Jenifer Lewis is one of those performers who can make a character stay with you long after the story
Jenifer Lewis: The Mother of Black Hollywood Who Refused to Hide Read More »
The Ancient Fascination With Other Worlds Human beings have been imagining other worlds for thousands of years. Long before telescopes, particle accelerators, or modern physics, ancient civilizations wondered about worlds beyond their own. They told stories of gods coming down from the heavens and spirits entering other realms. These stories described mysterious boundaries between the
The Name Behind the Music There are people whose faces become famous, and then there are people whose work becomes famous while they remain largely behind the curtain. Bryan-Michael Cox belongs to that second group. Millions of people have heard his music without necessarily knowing his name. If you listened to R&B during the late
Bryan-Michael Cox: The Man Behind the Sound of a Generation Read More »
What Success Looked Like When I Was Young When I was a young man, success looked different to me than it does today. Like many young people, I associated getting ahead with what I could accomplish and what other people could see. Money mattered to me. Having a good job and earning a decent living
A Life Worth Keeping: How My Definition of Success Changed Read More »
The Conversation That Never Really Stops There is one person I have been talking to for my entire life, and that person is me. Long before I understood anything about psychology, I knew there was a voice inside my head constantly commenting on what was happening. It reminded me of things I needed to do,
The Voice I Hear Most: Learning How to Talk to Myself Read More »
The Question Behind the Ten Dollars What is really stopping us from putting aside ten dollars a month, year after year, and teaching our children and grandchildren to do the same? On the surface, ten dollars does not sound revolutionary. Many of us spend that much without thinking about it. Yet when a small contribution
What Is Really Stopping Us? The Power and Challenge of Black Collective Economics Read More »
Another Nervous System Inside Us For most of my life, when I heard somebody talk about having a “gut feeling,” I understood it as a figure of speech. We say something does not sit right with us, that we have butterflies in our stomach, or that our gut is telling us not to trust a
The Second Brain: When My Gut Has Something to Say Read More »