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Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together is one of those books that hangs around in your mind long after you’ve closed it, not because of any particular shocking revelation, but because it quietly exposes the contradictions of modern life we all feel but rarely stop to name. Turkle, a clinical psychologist and longtime observer of our relationship

To give is not always to love. Too often, charity disguises itself as compassion while secretly nourishing the vanity of the giver. The poor, the hungry, the abandoned are placed on a stage where the benefactor shines, not they. The gesture is clothed in benevolence but carries within it a subtle humiliation: one stands above,

TimeBanks.Org · Episode

I was speaking with a friend not long ago, someone who spends his hours alongside me in the work we call charity. He told me that he enjoys the work but it is not his life. The remark stayed with me, almost like an echo that does not fade. It led me into the question

another rumination from a conversation with friends. When leading, one must carry both the vision of the horizon and the weight of those who walk beside. The temptation to stride too far ahead can be strong, some leaders often feel that they see more clearly where the path bends and where the obstacles lie hidden.

Reading Lyn Alden’s Broken Money feels a bit like having a long, eye-opening conversation with that one friend who somehow makes complicated topics make sense. She digs into the story of how money has evolved over centuries; from gold and coins to paper notes to the digital blur we live with today, and shows how

There was a time when money had weight. It clinked when dropped on a table and carried the cold glint of metal or the soft polish of worn shells passed from hand to hand. It felt real in the way fire or stone feels real, as though it was part of the world rather than

Marcel Mauss’ The Gift manages to be both deeply academic and strangely intimate. Initially, it seems like an anthropologist’s survey of exotic rituals in far-off places; potlatches among the tribes of the Pacific Northwest, ceremonial exchanges in Polynesia, or the endless circulation of necklaces and armbands in the Kula ring of the Trobriand Islands. But

I sometimes imagine what it would be like to live in one of those tiny Alaskan bush towns. Not the postcard version with moose sauntering down Main Street and auroras politely twinkling overhead, but the real kind, where the population is about the size of a large family reunion and everyone knows how many jars

I sometimes think we’ve all ended up working for a sort of ghost. Not the rattling-chains, moaning-through-the-wall kind, but something maybe worse: a superior who doesn’t even bother to haunt us directly. Somewhere, in an office or maybe on a server, there’s a person, or an algorithm, that technically signs off on what we do.

Every so often, someone suggests that capitalism can be saved if we just give it a good scrubbing. Wash off the grime of corruption, ring it out, hang it in the sun, and voilà; ethical capitalism. A system where money isn’t manipulated, people are treated fairly, and everything works the way it was supposed to

Why Small Gifts Matter More Than Big Systems Given the focus of my work over the last two years, I’ve been thinking a lot about how people relate to each other through the exchange of things. Not …

I was rewatching The Revenant today, mostly because sometimes you just need a little TOM HARDY.