Brian Wiesner

Admittedly, an increased difficulty in impressing friends with neat tips and trivia hardly constitutes a social crisis. And perhaps benefiting from closely kept secrets was too easy in the past, anyway: In my Punch-Out example, I gained a disproportionately large amount of esteem for something that required very little effort or skill. But when... See more

But what makes us

HAPPY

?

While this is likely a bit different for everyone, I believe that once we have reached the “love and belonging” step on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, we have already achieved a lot of happiness.

Human connection is absolutely key to wellbeing as found by many scientific studies. And conversely, social isolation has been... See more

I feel as though I am in one such moment in my inner life, where it feels like seeds I have been nurturing for some time are coming to life, and I am now beginning to understand what the labour I faithfully put in was for. I’m also aware that this phase is not permanent. I can see and appreciate the moment I am in as a moment . Something about that... See more

Everyone is trying to over-engineer this thing, but it is actually pretty simple.

Because there are very few people who are networking, even fewer are networking well .

I present you with the opportunity to be one of the few. One of the scrappy. One of the curious. One of the brave who decide that networking isn’t defined by the amorphous icky... See more

That piece by Patrick Brown cites a whole bunch of data that questions the assumption that urban form necessarily leads to neighborliness. He writes, for example:

Small towns, lauded by Putnam for their high rates of civic engagement, often boast the kind of low-density development and heavy automobile reliance associated with the much-maligned

... See more

Major companies spend billions of dollars on advertising each year in order to interrupt people for a chance at getting attention for their products.

Writers get that for free. They have tens of thousands of people raising their hands to say, “Sign me up. I want to read everything you write. You have my attention.”

Then when the writer uses a small... See more

Henry James speaks of his deliberate consignment of an idea to the realm of the unconscious where it can be worked upon and realized: "I was charmed with my idea, which would take, however, much working out; and because it had so much to give, I think, must I have dropped it for the time into the deep well of unconscious cerebra-tion: not without... See more

Author and activist Jane Jacobs argued that cities thrive when they mingle “everyday diversity of uses and users in its everyday streets.”

There is often something deeper below the surface motivating many of us to strive to uncover something more about ourselves and the nature of this world when we travel. But do we necessarily need to go looking for it “out there” beyond the horizon? Why might strolling the streets of Paris on a fall moonlit night enchant us in a way our midwestern... See more