My Next Thought

Earlier this week, I took a couple of colleagues to the Gandhi Ashram while we were in Ahmedabad. It wasn’t meant to be a profound moment. It was their first time in the city, and the ashram felt like the right place to take them—quiet, grounded, almost understated. Walk through. Read a few inscriptions. Absorb…

Last week, I wrote about why the world is rethinking America. Not as a protest, and not as a rejection, but as a recalculation — driven by a growing sense that the systems once assumed to be predictable are becoming harder to trust. Once people accept that background systems are fraying — whether in…

Why the World Is Rethinking America: The Country That Forgot Why Talent Came The world is rethinking America. Not loudly. Not angrily. But deliberately. In counseling offices in Delhi and Dubai. In family WhatsApp threads in Lagos and Lima. In spreadsheet comparisons that didn’t exist ten years ago. In the pause before a student clicks…

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…