"That’s how adolescence works. It’s a place of tremendous pain and recklessness, a place where you have to pretend not to care about anyone or anything too much because to do so would release the chaos of your actual self into the world. It’s a place where tyranny resides as much in circumstance as in character, a place where our shadow selves emerge: ugly, ferocious, lit up by shame."

"I cook for my family. To put it another way: I am my family's cook, and so I cook almost every night. I cook three hundred days a year, and have cooked three hundred days a year for years. I cook for the three of us — for my wife, my daughter, and myself — and before there were three of us, I cooked for the two of us. I am a husband who cooks for his wife, which makes me a man who cooks for his woman and now his women, which in turns makes me a man who to some extent cooks like a woman: out of love and generosity, yes, but also out of service, out of duty. I cook because it's my job. I don't get many days off from cooking. I don't take many days off cooking, because I only like to eat at restaurants that serve food better than my own, or that serve Mexican food or sushi. Hell, I don't even take days off from cooking when I go out for days on the road, because before I leave I prepare my family food to be eaten in my absence. I cook so that there is no absence. I cook so that I am always there, even when I'm gone, even when I die, and my cooking translates in my daughter's memory as, simply, this: time."

"I went through a difficult breakup and was extremely lonely. I posted a flyer in NYC that said, "Call me. (347) 469-3173". People took pictures of my flyer and put it on the net. I've received over 60,000 calls and texts. Met amazing people all over the world. People say to me all the time, "So you're not lonely anymore?" I am less lonely. This crazy idea actually worked. This blog consists of some of these conversations."

To do something well you have to like it. That idea is not exactly novel. We've got it down to four words: "Do what you love." But it's not enough just to tell people that. Doing what you love is complicated.

Images from Vivian Maier's Undeveloped Rolls

More than 20 other Tibetans have set themselves ablaze in the past year to protest Chinese government controls

When an attractive woman looks at a great painting, or heralds a great novel, or holds her hands in tween prayer doing that little happy bounce of excitement in the front row of a show at the first chord she recognizes, a million young boys with no chance will know what they want to do with their lives.