Nathanael Yellis

A fun workplace lunch conversation recently has been my boss's idea that Boston is held back by the number of separate municipalities that comprise what most people think of as Boston. While driving around, you might think you're in Boston, but you really make your way from Revere to Malden, Summerville and Cambridge, Boston itself, then quickly to Brookline or Newton. These aren't villages or neighborhoods, like Chestnut Hill or Mattapan or East Boston; these are separate municipalities with their own schools, police departments, and boards and mayors. I'm not sure if the theory that these separate cities hold the region back is correct. It seems to me that a little competition over which city can be the best could result in them all being a bit better. But the core of this idea is that our places and how we manage them matters.

Stories are interesting to the degree they are specific. Nothing's less interesting than a social scientist trying to summarize the results of focus groups or survey responses. There's little that tops the interest we give to gossip offered by a person we know about other people we know. There's a corollary in journalism. When reporters get people to use their own names to talk badly about other people, both we and they find it highly interesting.

There have been a few trend-pieces on age gaps recently. I guess people dating or marrying people far older/younger than themselves is interesting, although most of the pieces take the more judgmental approach. There seems to be no one more blameworthy than the person who slightly upends a social convention to make themselves better off. The age gap in a relationship often signifies a wealth or status gap as well: the rich older man finds a younger, more attractive woman than his poorer peers find; the wealthy older woman finds a younger, more attractive man; etc. The self-interest these relationships signify gives the cultural commentator just enough to write the trend-piece.

After leaving my job in politics, I found that I had a whole lot of freedom to rethink things. My old views seemed to matter a whole lot less. Upton Sinclair had it right, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." When my salary became apolitical, my opinions stopped being sacrosanct.

It's Holy Week. So let's talk about the American Religion.

Over the past year or so, I've read a bit in the modern type of Zen Buddhism promulgated by Alan Watts. The books have been uniformly interesting and wildly diverse: from the delightfully titled meditation guide Don't Just Do Something, Sit There to the fairly dense The Way of Zen to the ur-text of white people going on Tibetan pilgrimages The Snow Leopard. I've also sprinkled in some of Watts's essays and other authors aiming for the same thing: explorations of meaning, spirituality, and mindfulness untethered from western religious tradition.

We're deep in ski season. March is usually the snowiest month and the snowpack usually lasts until early May. It's been a little iffy this year: too many days of melting temperatures and a lot of forecasted snow that fell as rain. But we're still skiing a lot of acreage at our home mountain.

There seems to be two opposing ideas in our approach to career. On the one hand, there's quiet quitting and balancing life with career, exemplified by Anne Helen Peterson's work over the last decade or so. You can find any number of mid-career columnists decrying the lazy, entitled youth's approach to the workplace. On the other hand, there's how we actually live, which may be more concerning. American culture places its highest value on social advancement, educational attainment, and successful careerism.

Why does Vanity Fair have the most readable review of Apple's new headset computer? Tech blogs aren't not known for the readability, but usually you can find at least one funny and more thoughtful piece. Ben Thompson had a good one, perhaps the best one I saw in the tech "press." He even asked the inevitable question about what happens to a society when everyone wears headsets and earphones all the time in an intelligent way. The rest of the tech press seemed wrapped around the axle: is Facebook's headset better? Why does Apple's have a separate battery pack? Will the videos be better than on your tv?