This is an installment of Startup Year One, a special series of interviews with founders about the major lessons they have learned in the immediate aftermath of their businesses’ first year of operation. While pregnant with her first son and working full-time at the United Nations as a strategist for partnerships, business development, and stakeholder […]
Tag: lifestyle
Murmuration: A Stunning Animated Poem About Our Connection to Nature and Each Other
A collaborative praise song for “indifference banished by love.” In one of the essays collected in Vesper Flights (public library) — which was among the finest books of 2020 and includes one of the most magnificent things ever written about the enchantment of the total solar eclipse — Helen Macdonald reflects on watching starlings swarm […]
Confucius on Self-Discipline, the 6 Steps to a Harmonious Society, and Why Democracy Begins in the Heart
“Things have roots and branches… If the root be in confusion, nothing will be well governed.” Two and a half millennia before Leonard Cohen wrote in his timeless and tender ode to democracy that “the heart has got to open in a fundamental way,” the ancient Chinese philosopher and statesman Confucius (551–479 BCE) recognized the […]
Exclusive: Harry’s Labs takes a skin care approach to hair care with new brand Headquarters
The skin care product industry has soared to unprecedented levels in both popularity and sales over the last few years, knocking down makeup sales along the way, in major part to a less than glamorous concept: routine. From beauty blogs to Reddit, skin care obsessives share in precise detail about ideal, daily (and often twice […]
The Boy Whose Head Was Filled with Stars: The Inspiring Illustrated Story of How Edwin Hubble Revolutionized Our Understanding of the Universe
“We do not know why we are born into the world, but we can try to find out what sort of world it is.” In 1908, Henrietta Swan Leavitt — one of the women known as the Harvard Computers, who revolutionized astronomy long before they could vote — was analyzing photographic plates at the Harvard […]
The founder who decided to to stop fundraising and instead hold onto her equity
This is an installment of Startup Year One, a special series of interviews with founders about the major lessons they have learned in the immediate aftermath of their businesses’ first year of operation. Many founders fall into the trap of believing that fundraising is a rite of passage in the startup world. But it can […]
Einstein on the Political Power of Art
“Nothing can equal the psychological effect of real art — neither factual descriptions nor intellectual discussion.” “Tyrants always fear art because tyrants want to mystify while art tends to clarify,” Iris Murdoch wrote in her arresting 1972 address on art as a force of resistance. “Those who tell you ‘Do not put too much politics […]
Dotspotting Expressionist Science: What the Mysterious Color-Markings on Storm Drains Have to Do with Rachel Carson’s Legacy and the War on a Deadly Virus
Strange signals from the lacuna between street art and microbiology. I noticed them first in my neighborhood — dots of paint hovering over the grate of the storm drain in a blue-green spectrum punctuated by white. I noticed them probably because I had been writing about the wondrous science of the color blue and my […]
Loops, the Limits of Language, the Paradoxical Loneliness of “I Love You,” and What Keeps Love Alive
“The very task of love and of language is to give to one and the same phrase inflections which will be forever new.” When I walk — which I do every day, as basic sanity-maintenance, whether in the forest or the cemetery or the city street — I walk the same routes, walk along loops, […]
The Blue Hour: A Stunning Illustrated Celebration of Nature’s Rarest Color
“The day ends. The night falls. And in between… there is the blue hour.” Blue, Rebecca Solnit wrote in one of humanity’s most beautiful reflections on our planet’s primary hue, is “the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here… the color of longing for the distances you never arrive […]