Whenever I mentioned to people that I was working on a story about friendship in midlife, questions about envy invariably followed. It’s an irresistible subject, this thing that Socrates called “the ulcer of the soul.” Paul Bloom, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto, told me that many years ago, he taught a seminar at Yale about the seven deadly sins. “Envy,” he said dryly, “was the one sin students never boasted about.”

He’s right. With the exception of envy, all of the deadly sins can be pleasurable in some way. Rage can be righteous; lust can be thrilling; greed gets you all the good toys. But nothing feels good about envy, nor is there any clear way to slake it. You can work out anger with boxing gloves, sate your gluttony by feasting on a cake, boast your way through cocktail hour, or sleep your way through lunch. But envy—what are you to do with that?

Die of it, as the expression goes. No one ever says they’re dying of pride or sloth.

This is one of those articles that is hard to pull one single quote from, because it’s just so damn good.

The whole piece hits me right in the chest, and I’m sure you, dear reader, have someone you should be reaching out to after reading this too.

Nearby, chunky steel boxes, each about the size of a toaster oven, are lined up on long tables. They’re the currency vaults from the MetroCard machines, and they arrive from the stations locked. “When you pull them out of the machine, they self-seal, and the only key exists here.” A couple of clerks are methodically opening them up, stacking the bills into little plastic racks and then feeding them into a bank of huge bulk counting machines. “Eighty thousand notes per hour,” Putre says. “It’s going to authenticate, then count, then sort, then strap, all in one step. What four people can do in this room used to take 12 people before we had this machine. Before the pandemic, we’d run two, three machines every single day. Now we run a couple of days a week.” It’s satisfying to encounter the mechanical whir of it all, especially this year: bills and coins, paper and metal, notes and specie instead of ones and zeroes.

This was a delightful look at the operation required to count all the money that flows through New York’s public transit system.

The elite special agents assigned to the ISB—the National Park Service’s homegrown equivalent to the FBI—are charged with investigating the most complex crimes committed on the more than 85 million acres of national parks, monuments, historical sites, and preserves administered by the National Park Service, from Alaska’s Noatak National Preserve to Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park.

Three are exactly 33 brave women and men who are part of the Investigative Services Branch, tasked with protecting our national parks.

I'm a sucker for learning how things are made, and this video certainly changed my impression of how ski lifts are installed.

Which, admittedly, made me realize that I even had an impression of of how ski lifts are installed.

Anyway, the ingenuity of this whole operation just made me smile. It made me think of Gus and Charlee working with those new Lego blocks at the Children's Museum last weekend. We humans really like building things, don't we?

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.