Sublime

an informed optimist

He’d once told me that the art of getting ahead in New York was based on learning how to express dissatisfaction in an interesting way.

Questlove is a polymath—an

To know a person well, you have to know who they were before they suffered their losses and how they remade their whole outlook after them.

The awareness gave him pause: perhaps a funny-looking mixed-race kid could exist at the center of the world, not just on its periphery.

Repetition, it turned out, was less important than struggle.

the thinking

Big questions interrupt the daily routines people fall into and prompt them to step back and see their life from a distance.