Lyndsey Medford

I end up crying over beautiful things. Because they're beautiful, despite the grief of the world. And my experience with grief in my life has made me long for beauty, in ways that I'm not even aware of. Like I was in vacation, I was in Saint Remy de Provence, and there's a sanatorium there where Van Gogh ended his life. I believe he killed himself ... See more

We think we can win against grief. We think we can fix it. But you can't. You can only experience it. And to fully experience that, you have to accept that it's real. The loss is real. I don't know about you, but I'm very good at rewriting reality to fit what I'd like it to be on any given moment. And in my entire life, I've had to work very hard t... See more

I study resilience as it relates to disaster response, and contemporary scholars are more or less in agreement that the concept of resilience is used as a way to place responsibility that belongs with the government onto individuals and communities that are hit the hardest by various extreme events (almost always low income communities of color). O... See more

I would say that most of our experiences of ourselves are quite deeply irrational. If you stop a couple in the street and say to them, why are you married? You are not going to get a rational answer from them. You’re going to get murmurings, some sentimental, some partially logical, some apologetic, some unsure.

Suppose a startup is testing a new customer acquisition strategy. Instead of launching a full-blown marketing campaign, it starts small, running a limited ad campaign with basic content to gauge audience engagement. As it iterates, it scales up what works and swiftly pivots away from what doesn’t. This approach allows it to quickly identify what wo... See more

I offered an invitation to ‘slow down’, which seems like the wrong thing to do when there’s fire on the mountain. But here’s the point: in ‘hurrying up’ all the time, we often lose sight of the abundance of resources that might help us meet today’s most challenging crises. We rush through into the same patterns we are used to. Of course, there isn’... See more