I am on an Amtrak train heading to New York and I am walking across cars looking for a seat. It is weird seeing almost everybody absorbed in their little screens. I glimpse people doomscrolling through social media feeds, playing video games, watching a movie, shopping online, and the occasional long read. Most place a…

I am convinced that sleep (and taking long walks) are the bedrock of mental well-being. What happens internally helps you manage what happens externally. So, in that spirit, I started taking some supplements to optimize my sleep. One of these is magnesium, two variants are the more popular for sleep: l-threonate and glycenate. I have…

I’m having a hard time finding a recorded lecture that is delivered with scholarship, eloquence, passion, and vigor as the one that historian Timothy Snyder gave at Yale in 2015 on his book “Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning.” The historian managed to speak for 50 straight minutes without looking at his notes,…

In an inter-connected world, finding friends has never been more easy, and yet these relationships have never been more fragile. The increased pool of potential friend relations, enabled by meetup apps and social media, makes relations more ephemeral and fragile. Before social media, finding friends required meeting in third places (bars, barber shops, parks, private…

I am at that age where my friends are getting married. This Labor Day Weekend I traveled to California to attend a dear friend’s wedding. For this one, I was invited to be one of the groomsmen. One of us was assigned the role of a videographer to document messages by each of us to…

As I finish designing an introductory course on conservation science, I cannot help but reflect on the big ideas. One of them is the inherent lesson of time: all buildings eventually decay and fall, just as we humans will all eventually decay, and if one stretches the time scale to millions of years, our planet…

Last night I had a nightmare about being persecuted by drug cartels trying to end everyone’s lives. I was in my dad’s hotel and was running away, looking for a place to hide. A place for safety. My instinct was to get to the roof and climb one of the water towers and seek shelter.…

This weekend I went to New York City to attend a club event. On Saturday, I spent the late afternoon reading at the Rose Reading Room. When the library closed, I then headed for dinner in Bryant Park. There was an event happening in the main open greenspace and it got very crowded, very quickly.…

Yesterday I went to bed late watching movies against my optimistic belief I could just go straight to bed from work and wake up by 6am. A winding down buffer of at least an hour and a half is always needed —preferably not involving screens and involving more pages. I wonder what other areas of…

Knowledge about how your colleagues do things helps you become a better colleague. It uproots mistakes from your end and saves headaches to everyone in the work ecosystem. It helps make things easier to them. It reminds me of Socrates’ insight that ignorance is the most common root for evil. Ignorance about how things work…