Josh Bowen

I’d like to keep my family together and raise my boys into adults who are “publicly useful and privately happy.” Anything else is gravy.

It’s a rather simple question that quickly gets to the core of someone’s sense of well-being and legitimacy: did your childhood leave you feeling that you were – on balance – OK as you were? Or did you somewhere along the way derive an impression that you needed to be extraordinary in order to deserve a place on the earth? And, to raise an... See more

After all, cities are where people are supposed to have serendipitous encounters—as the writer and critic Jane Jacobs said, “The metropolis provides what otherwise could be given only by traveling; namely, the strange.” By comparison, the cliché goes, people become more atomized the farther they move from urban environments into the clinical, safe,... See more

Ultimately, she said, a world made up of atomized, physically isolated people is a world without a true shared reality—which is a recipe for civic disengagement, misinformation, and perhaps even political extremism.

My observation is that most people expect learning to decelerate. It’s not uncommon to see this attitude among fresh college grads.

No matter how many people come over for dinner, you’re only going to be able to engage with a few.

And no matter how big the crowd in the arena, the musicians can only see the faces of a few hundred.

An investor can only be engaged and smart about a very small number of companies.

And it doesn’t matter how many students are in the class, the teacher

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