I woke up early this morning so I could have a little time awake before heading out to run a 5K. I was still in my bathrobe, sipping black coffee, with the floor-to-ceiling windows behind me overlooking the Raquette River. I love this view from our vacation home. I love the water, the boat, the change of pace, and the quiet that comes from being away from my normal routine. But after chatting with my friend for about 30 minutes, I realized that my favorite part about being up here is not actually the scenery or the time off work. It's moments like this.

Six days before I was supposed to speak at an event in Quebec City, I realized I still had almost no information about it. I had back-to-back events scheduled in Montreal and Quebec City, a hotel reservation I could still cancel, and a growing suspicion that the silence might mean low attendance or, worse, a canceled event. Suddenly, what should have been a simple work trip turned into a decision: cancel the reservation and save the money, or take the chance and go anyway?

I was in the back of a small dark pub in Quebec City cheering for Cabo Verde as they scored against Uruguay. A week earlier, I didn’t even know Cabo Verde was in the World Cup. Yet there I was, completely invested in this underdog story. To be fair, I was not exactly neutral going into this game as I have had a very specific World Cup grudge against Uruguay since 2010, when Luis Suárez…

Today, America turns 250, which means I have been thinking a lot about what it means to celebrate a country you live in, and should love, while also being furious about the direction it is moving. For me, patriotism has never meant pretending America has always gotten it right. It has never meant ignoring slavery, Indigenous dispossession, Jim Crow, voter suppression, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, or the countless ways this country has denied people the very freedoms it claimed to protect. The Declaration of Independence said that “all men are created equal,” but from the beginning, that promise was written more broadly than it was practiced.

I’m working from Hannawa Falls, NY this week, and my “office” is a screened-in porch that looks out over the water. I’m getting so much done, checking things off, moving work forward like I always do but because of what we talked about a few weeks ago with the effects of nature on the brain, I feel more relaxed than I do sitting at my desk at home.  And still, there’s a part of my brain that isn’t satisfied. 

We love a good workplace hero story. The person who stayed late, fixed the issue, and saved the day. The one who logged in on Saturday and made sure everything got done. Those moments get praised, recognized, and sometimes even rewarded. 

But what if those are not the things we should be celebrating? 

I spent most of the day inside today. I went straight from my bed to my office, to the gym, then to the co-working space. But for 15 minutes on my way to and from the gym, I drove through the Watchung Reservation. It seems silly, because I didn’t ever leave my car, but with the windows down and all the trees taking up my view, I swear it made a difference in my day; when I looked it up later, I realized it wasn’t all in my head.

It is a warm, sunny Saturday, and I am sitting at my favorite café, the one I always end up at when I want to think for a minute. As I watch the sun stretch across the sidewalk, I find myself thinking about starting over. Not in a dramatic way - I love my life - but there are so many things that could use a refresh.

Someone was always going to win the Cocodona 250. That's what Rachel Entrekin kept reminding herself of while running across 253 miles of Arizona terrain: “Why not you? Why not now? Why not try?” As she later explained, that was the mantra she repeated to herself throughout the race: "Somebody has to win, so ... why not believe that it could be you?”

When I started writing this post, I had just finished my second snowboard run of the season. As I flew down the black diamond, smiling and having the time of my life, someone in front of me took a sharp turn. I called out, “On your left! On your left!” but they either didn’t hear me or didn’t have the control to stop. I carved hard to avoid them, caught an edge, and down I went.

In January, I set a New Years Resolution to take my writing more seriously. As part of that resolution, I set a goal to Write for at least 30 minutes every day and the words I am writing right now are because of that promise to myself.

Last Winter, I picked up snowboarding again. After I brushed off my old board, which was collecting dust in the attic, I hit the slopes for the first time in over 15 years. It was like riding a bike. I immediately remembered the thrill of going down the mountain, but I also was very aware that I was significantly older and therefore at greater risk for lasting injury. At first, it was hard to let myself take it easy. I had it engrained in me that lift tickets were not cheap and so I should be getting up at the crack of dawn to make it to the lift right when it opens. I should be spending every moment on the mountain that I could.

This winter I found myself at the top of Shawnee Mountain in Pennsylvania, settling into that easy, sun‑warmed rhythm of après ski. I had a beer in hand and was chatting with a couple of people I’d just met at the bar. It was the kind of conversation that feels effortless simply because everyone is still buzzing from the run they just finished. At some point, we bonded over the fact that two of us were both "goofy". No, not in personality (although that was also probably true), but in the way we road down the mountain: goofy riders have their right foot forward which is the less common stance for most snowboarders.

One and a half miles. That’s how long it takes me to start enjoying my workout. Which, at my pace, is no small thing. If I’m running, that’s at least 15 minutes. If I’m walking, it’s 20 to 30, and for every one of those minutes before that point, I am not smiling, glowing, or floating on a runner’s high. I am simply… doing it.

Somewhere along the way, adulthood picked up this idea that friendship is supposed to look like a perfectly assembled group photo: a tight‑knit crew that brunches every weekend, takes annual trips, and moves through life as a single, smiling unit. Social media reinforces it, sitcoms normalize it, and suddenly the absence of a “friend group” can feel like a personal shortcoming rather than a simple reflection of how most people actually live.

As many of you who follow me on Instagram know, I’ve been doing some renovation work lately; the kind of work that requires tools I don’t normally reach for and decisions I can’t undo with a simple CTRL Z. At one point, I needed to cut a large piece of drywall. So, I measured, I marked, and I cut. And then I realized, almost immediately, that I had cut the entire thing backwards.

All Winter around 7:30am, I strolled into the gym looking absolutely ridiculous in my hat, scarf and giant coat, doing everything in my power to keep the cold New Jersey winter from touching my soul. But I somehow made it through, day after frigidly cold day, because I finally found the formula that works for me.

One of my favorite modern conveniences is my Ring doorbell. I love knowing exactly when my packages arrive, and I really love pretending I’m not home when someone knocks and I’m not in the mood for human interaction. While any introvert out there probably also uses their smart doorbell in this way, we all know the real purpose of technology like this is safety. And long before smart tech and Wi‑Fi, that idea started with a woman whose name most people have never heard: Marie Van Brittan Brown.

In the mid‑1960s, as a new graduate student at Cambridge, Jocelyn Bell helped build a radio telescope by hand: 120 miles of wire and cable stretched across a four‑acre field. Once it was operating, she spent long days examining the telescope’s chart recordings, scanning for the subtle scintillation patterns her team hoped would reveal distant quasars. Amid the routine “bits of scruff” in the data, she eventually noticed something different: a signal that repeated with uncanny regularity. That tiny, rhythmic pulse would become the first recognized pulsar, a discovery that transformed astrophysics.

In the early days of computing, long before machines hummed in server rooms or lived in our pockets, a “computer” wasn’t a device; it was a person and more often than not, that person was a woman. Women filled rooms at observatories, government agencies, and research labs, performing the painstaking calculations that powered astronomy, ballistics, engineering, and early data science. This is something I already knew about because of great movies like Hidden Figures, but something that I didn't hear about until recently was the term used to describe their output.