A “Wait, what?!” moment is a chance to get curious and learn about the systems behind an unexpected event.

Work and education overlap in all sorts of ways, from the economic to the political to the cultural and social. Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, a historian of education and the host of the American Campus Podcast, shares how higher ed has evolved and what that means for the future of work.

Old assumptions and beliefs created future selves we invested time and effort into—when we deconstruct those beliefs, we must also grieve the selves they bore.

What happens when we remember to circle back

What the push for AI everything has to do with the “great feminization” panic—and how both propose to reshape the workplace

Doing some decision-making? Need to choose between a few good options? Well, a little logic puzzle might help.

I’m trying to get back to what works.

How do you get others to care about what you care about? You have to care about what they care about.

The key to agile problem-solving? Portable thinking.

Why do ambitious and unconventional missions so often erode into something more like the status quo?

How HBO’s The Pitt can help us rethink busyness—and find ways to navigate it with care and grace

Crosswords, coffeeshops, and untangling life’s challenges by rethinking the problems we think we have.

It sure seems like The New York Times is trolling me.

If competence porn is media that titillates by showing highly skilled people doing their thing, then what could an erotics of competence look like?

How I use the “man behind the curtain” framework, the process of normalization, and the theory of value capture to make sense of chaos.

Chaos—what it is, why it occurs, and how we can approach it with curiosity.

Thoughts on college prep, midlife, and as-of-yet-uninvented careers.

The federal bureaucracy is going through a “reduction in force.” What does that have to do with you and your work? Quiet a lot, actually.

Taking time to reread, rewatch, or relisten can be taking time to rediscover yourself.

To break the Validation Spiral, we have to change the structure of the system.