Blog Posts

There was a stencil on the sidewalk outside of my old Hell’s Kitchen apartment that read, “Being impatient won’t get you the secret song.” We all have secrets, truths that gnaw at us, crush our spirit, and kill us from the inside out. Here’s mine. Like millions of Americans, adverse childhood experiences (divorce, assault) left me hypervigilant. Chronic…

Alberto Mendoza is a master class in turning challenges into opportunities. As a Mexican-American teenager growing up in San Diego, California, Alberto was flummoxed by the lack of representation at Montgomery High School. “The high school was about 65% Mexican kids,” he explains. “But the Filipino kids ran all the activities: they ran the newspaper,…

When I’m really lucky, a whole verse or chorus will unfold in front of me. And I’ll grab my iPhone and press that big red record button. Such was the case on October 4, 2020, when the following fell from my lips onto my phone: “And I don’t know what you think that you heard,…

Though the United States represents just over 4 percent of the world’s population, it houses 2.3M or nearly 20 percent of the world’s prisoners. For most Americans, this is a rarely considered and largely anonymized population. But to the Human Kindness Foundation, this forgotten population is an untapped resource for love and creativity, and a…

When I first met Michael Slackman at Columbia University in 2014, he was the epitome of Bronx-born cool: fast-talking, wise-cracking, and whip-smart. A one-time bureau chief in Berlin, Cairo, and Moscow, and current Assistant Managing Editor for International at The New York Times, Slackman led reportage across the newsroom and oversees bureaus around the globe. For…

When I was twelve or so, I fashioned a desk from a cardboard box, placed my mom’s Smith-Corona Super Sterling typewriter on top, tucked a slip of paper marked “Press” in my brother’s fedora and began publication of a neighborhood broadsheet. Little wonder Freakonomics Radio Network’s EVP, Neal Carruth, and I get along like gangbusters.…