This is an incredible piece of storytelling.

Professionally speaking, the use of parallax and "scrolljacking" generally irritates me. In this instance, the techniques are really well implemented and meaningfully improve the story's impact.

Personally speaking, the mental health struggles Alenka overcame are inspiring. Her zen-like approach to both free diving and life in general is one worthy of adapting.

Load this one on your laptop. I promise it'll be worth it.

In the best case scenario, we create routines to hypnotize ourselves into repetition. We have loved ones and mentors who tell us to keep going, and help us figure out when we’re on the wrong track. We look for signs that we’re getting better, but we also understand that the process of getting really, really good at something sometimes just feels like a incoherent slog. If we’re lucky and resourceful and creative, we’ll eventually break through the membrane and find ourselves on the other side we’ve been clawing towards for so long.

None of this, he said, is about ever running again for public office. “Elderly statesman” is how he describes his role now.

“When you leave office, you realize — well, I realized — that I just couldn’t cut it off like that,” he said. “Just because I’m finished with this job that is only kind of a temporary job, does it mean that I have interest only in a temporary way? No! It’s like sports, with the follow-through.”

A tremendously well-written profile on one of my lifelong idols.

My hunch is that Arnold’s enduring popularity lies somewhere in the mixture of his incredible work ethic, his proclivity to address societal problems with “common sense”, his unique upbringing, his charismatic personality, and his boundless ambition.

Is Arnold perfect? Of course not. But he’s the voice that the right wing of politics deserves. Get back to focusing on solving problems, not winning at all costs.

Good decision makers understand a simple truth: you can’t make good decisions without good thinking and good thinking requires time.

Good decisions make the future easier, giving you more time and less stress.

Many of my favorite Simpsons episodes of all time, including “Homer at the Bat” and “Bart Gets an Elephant”, were written by John Swartzwelder.

This article is a rare interview with a notoriously reclusive guy, and as someone who was practically raised at the altar of this show, getting a closer look at one of their disciples was a treat.

We are always falling in love or quarreling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and recovering, following public affairs. If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.

Consider a man who leaves his menopausal wife and family to start a new family with a younger, fertile woman. Or think of certain high-status, married fathers who spend considerable time and money on girlfriends, mistresses and even prostitutes. Yet, many other men choose to forego these pursuits. They override impulses that evolution has programmed into their brains, impulses that evolved because they enhanced the reproductive success of their ancestors. They do so out of love and respect for their partners and their children, and out of respect for social and cultural norms. But how do they do what males of other species seem incapable of?

The answer, I believe, is that they rely on the crowning achievement of human brain evolution: the prefrontal cortex. Not only is the human brain three times larger than the brain of our closest living primate relatives, the great apes, but the human prefrontal cortex is also larger than expected for our brain size. Our prefrontal cortex is what allows us to override ancient, evolved impulses in the service of honouring commitments, abiding by social norms, and exercising our moral responsibilities. We are privileged to have this remarkable organ, and we fathers would all do well to make use of it.

I grew up in a place, and a time, where hobbies — activities that had no place on your resume, no function in getting you into a better school — were still commonplace. Amongst the bourgeois American middle class, it’s becoming increasingly clear that Old Millennials were the last to experience this attitude towards activities and leisure. My partner spent his junior high and high school years at a competitive prep school on the Main Line in Philly, and has only recently come to realize that he had no hobbies, and no sense of what he actually liked to do, just what he needed to do in order to shape himself for school, then college, then work. Every hobby, for him, is an adult hobby — and thus all the more difficult to discover and adopt.

Hobbies are tough, especially hobbies that take up large chunks of a day (such as training for a marathon) or an actual entire day (such as getting season tickets to a sporting event).

I've got a few things that I'm thinking of getting into this year. First, tinkering with physical things. I am gonna try to restore some of my older broken tech that is laying dormant in my basement.

Second, flying. I want to get a discovery flight and possibly get my pilot's license.

Both of these things will take up "time", but frankly, after giving up most of my social media, I have a lot of free time in the evenings that gets eaten up with television. I'm ready to start trying some new things and being curious again.

Who couldn’t love a story like this? Two people biked across America with a mission to pack out as much trash as they could.

A beautifully told story that compels one to really take stock on what matters in life.

In a lot of ways, this video is boring, useless, and a colossal waste of time.

In many other ways, however, this is compelling to the point of fascination.

A Swedish carpenter discovers giant 13 meter rafter supports inside an 800 year old church. He thinks to himself, “I wonder how they were able to use such beautiful wood in order to create this.”

What does he do? He enlists the help of 3 fellow master carpenters, who in turn locate a suitably similar tree, discuss their hypothesis around the tools and techniques used, and then execute those ideas.

This video is emblematic of a style of YouTube video I’ve been obsessed with lately: how do things work? Not just old tech, but extremely old tech.

I’ve never thought to myself, “how did people used to build big buildings?”, but I’m sure glad somebody else not only had that thought, but decided to document it for others to learn from.