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Screenwork has been hit by a Weimar scale inflation

Smart Questions are, typically, kind of dumb. And, just as typical, questions that might initially seem dumb or underinformed, or downright unintelligent, are the smartest way to learn stuff if you’re a journalist, an academic, or anybody else.

The biggest obstacle to our capacity to love each other is that we fear the asymmetry of giving and not receiving. But the heart is a muscle: you can make it bigger by training it, and the bigger it gets the less it cares for symmetry or saving face. Instead of repetitions of lifting weights, you train your heart with repetitions of *directing compassion at things*, like that friend who's less available to see you than they used to be, or the crush who ghosted you after several nice dates.

As an important aside, if you try to learn on your own, it can be really hard. You’ll hit some weird ruby error and give up. It’s important to have someone—a friend, a teacher at a coding bootcamp, etc.—that get you through these frustrating blocks.

David Whyte nailed this in *Constellations*, writing, “Ambition left to itself, like a Rupert Murdoch, always becomes tedious, its only object, the creation of later and larger empires of control.”

Over the course of the potty training weekend, my husband and I repeated the goal to my son what felt like hundreds of times — and it wasn’t just “poop and pee in the potty” — he’d known he was supposed to do that for months now and that hadn’t motivated him. The goal now was to keep his underwear clean and dry. We reminded him constantly that to do that, he’d have to tell us when we had to go. Trust your child to do that even if you think they won’t — kids this age don’t like to be forced to do *anything*.

For years, science and conventional wisdom have stated unequivocally that looking at a device — like a smartphone, tablet, laptop, or television — before bed is akin to lighting years of your natural life on fire, then letting the flames consume your children, your community, and the very concept of human progress. Simply Google “screens before bed” and you’ll find thousands of articles, many from higher-education institutions and furious British people (they seem the most worked up about this issue as a nation). The message is clear: The blue light emitting from your devices is destroying your natural melatonin reserves, altering your circadian rhythms, and making you ugly. Watching TV or TikTok before bed is giving you headaches and making you confused, leading to depression, diabetes, cancer, and early death. If your offspring opt for the same crutch, they will never achieve greatness.

I'm of the camp that unpursued ideas are worth zero dollars. (Maybe less than zero, since they are occuyping brain space.)

We learned during our first year that to our surprise, 80% of our users were business travelers. This led to our first pivot, where we started to focus on business travelers exclusively.

We are all in control of how we experience time. We can let time happen to us OR we can make time work for us.