My Next Thought

What Fear Means After You’ve Already Left Thirty-four years ago, I left home. I didn’t call it courage. I didn’t call it bravery. I didn’t even call it a choice. I called it necessary. I was eighteen years old when I landed at JFK Airport on January 7th, 1992. Winter had arrived before I did…

Every new year begins with the same comforting assumption: that what comes next will be a cleaner, calmer extension of what came before. It won’t be. The real risk we carry into 2026 isn’t chaos. It’s the belief that stability is about to return on its own. That politics will cool down. That education will…

The Things We Forget We Survived: An Inventory Before Moving Forward The end of the year is a strange time. Everyone starts talking like philosophers. New year, fresh start, resolutions, hope. It’s the global season of “be your best self,” even though most people step into it with a knot in their stomach and a…

Two places. Two tragedies. Brown University. Bondi Beach. Different countries. Different contexts. Same ending. A brief moment of shock. A rush of posts. Carefully worded grief. “Thoughts and prayers.” “This should never happen.” A familiar choreography of sorrow and outrage, calibrated just enough to signal that we are good, caring people. And then, quietly, we…

cooked adjective having achieved a state of failure; being doomed I’ve spent the past year across continents and at conferences, listening to our field take its own temperature. Last week’s AIRC conference was simply the last stop of the season — and I walked away with a sobering realization. We are still talking about symptoms,…

The Immigrant Paradox: Why the Last One In Slams the Door Shut I met an old friend for dinner last week. Like me, he’s an immigrant — came to the U.S. through legal channels, built a life from scratch, works hard, stays out of trouble, and pays his taxes. The classic bootstrap story. We used…

Radical Gratitude: The Kind That Costs You Something Thanksgiving arrives like clockwork, wrapped in ritual and softness. We gather around tables, pass bowls, rehearse a script we all know by heart. We perform gratitude the way we perform small talk — politely, predictably, safely - a polite ritual we participate in so we don’t disrupt the…

I am an immigrant. Or maybe an expat. Or maybe the line between the two says more about power than identity. I came to America almost 34 years ago carrying a story that millions of young people still carry today — that the West is the land of unfiltered opportunity. I knew nothing of the shadows beneath…

The Sound of Nothing: What the 6-7 Craze Reveals About a Generation on Loop “6-7, I just bipped right on the highway (bip, bip) Skrrt… I just bipped right on the highway, Trackhawk sittin’ in the driveway… pull up, doot-doot, doo-doo-doo.” — Skrilla Two numbers. Word of the year. From Nairobi to New York, teenagers are chanting…

As the Boeing 737 rumbled down Runway 23 at Julius Nyerere International Airport and reached VR, I knew I was about to take off - away from the stillness of Dar es Salaam and back into the noise of the world. But part of me stayed behind in that silence - in a city where…

I was in Tanzania over the past 5 days — a country under lockdown amid election-related violence. Internet access was shut down, and even the cellular network was faint and fleeting. While it was frustrating to be unable to reach family, friends, and colleagues, there was also a strange sense of relief in being untethered…

The White House is being torn down. Not all of it, of course — just enough to make room for a ballroom. A gaudy one, I’m sure. If that doesn’t symbolize what’s happening to this country, I don’t know what does. A century-old symbol of policy, position, and public service is being gutted to appease…