Essays

I can't stop thinking about the Philippines. I've been fascinated by the country for years now. It started with Filipino co-workers and my curiosity about their stories. Then I was reading Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon and the Philippines was right there in the middle of

I’ve been thinking about what it means to be a writer, not in the sense of success or craft, just in terms of what actually happens. What we make. What we don’t. We only ever get half. I write something. I know what I intended. I know the

If you leave a twelve-step adherent alone in a room with a bottle and no escape, they will drink. Not because they crave alcohol, but because they cannot bear to be with themselves. The program taught them how to resist the substance, but nothow to sit alone with their thoughts

We used to be protected by friction. If someone wanted to know what you said, they had to be there. They had to listen. They had to care. That effort, the act of witnessing, was part of the social contract. You could speak freely because you trusted the weight of the moment would carry your meaning.

Mistakes get screenshotted and immortalized, leaving people with a kind of digital scarlet letter.

The Special Olympics has been a powerful positive force in the lives of hundreds of thousands of people with intellectual disabilities, inspiring vast improvements in physical fitness and healthcare (it's healthy athletes program has helped more than 1.9 million people worldwide) as well as giving them the