We were in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, getting ready for a tour. Tours start in the Vélez Blanco Patio, a light-filled marble courtyard just past the library. The kind of space that makes you pause—not just because it’s beautiful, but because it feels transported from somewhere else. Which, it turns out, it was.
The room is so unique, I had to ask, “Where did this room come from?”
When I was a kid, every sitcom seemed to have a time capsule episode. The kids would gather at school, bury a box filled with artifacts—a mixtape, a letter to the future—planning to dig it up years later.
I realized that I could do the same for 2020, but as a virtual time capsule—not one packed with sourdough starters and rolls of toilet paper, but a collection of the moments and memories that defined that strange year. And today, March 15, 2025—five years after New York City shut down its schools—feels like the right time to open it.
Rules for good passwords seem less like security measures and more like a practical joke. Your password must have at least one uppercase letter, one lowercase letter, one number, and one special character. It must not contain dictionary words, but it must also be memorable. It must be changed every 90 days, but it must not be similar to your last five passwords. It should be impossible for anyone to guess, except for you, who must recall it effortlessly at a moment’s notice.1
There’s something about folk stories behind names that makes the world feel richer. Names, after all, aren’t just labels—they’re little windows into the past, into the way people once understood the world. And when the official explanation is dry, people fill in the gaps with something better.
I managed to break my ankle in the most absurd way possible. Technically, I was on my way to go skiing—but saying I was skiing would be a stretch. It’s complicated… I’ll just let some familiar characters explain it.
Stimulation Clicker from Neal.fun
“Do you know about Neal.fun?” I asked.
“Yeah,” says Ari, my seventh grader. “We used to play this in the library last year and told the teacher it was an educational game.”
For those who haven’t fallen down the rabbit hole yet, Neal.fun is a website full of interactive experiments—part game, part thought exercise, part total weirdness. It’s an odd mix of Ari and me, of young and old. It was created by Neal Agarwal, a 26-year-old Virginia Tech graduate who has built something that looks a lot like the internet I knew in the late ’90s.
He was just an ordinary product manager, struggling with messy data and failed queries. Day after day, he was constantly thwarted by the complexities of SQL. Queries were unsolvable puzzles—joins, aggregations, and null values tripping him up at every turn. Then, one fateful afternoon, everything changed. He discovered a secret weapon against his SQL struggles—LLMs. With AI by his side, he could finally conquer those inscrutable queries and turn ideas into insights with confidence.
And he became… Super SQL Man!
This is his story.
When we were in London, we went to the fanciest teahouse in the world and were given a pastry fork—a delicate little thing, part fork, part knife, designed for the precise task of slicing through scones and dainty pastries. Sitting there in such an elegant setting, it struck me how much effort goes into creating an air of sophistication around something so simple.
The pastry fork, for all its refinement, wasn’t so different from the spork—an everyday utensil that trades elegance for practicality. Yet here, in this grand tea room, it was presented with an air of quiet authority, as if it held the secret to a more civilized way of eating. It made me think about how much of what we consider refined or high culture isn’t necessarily about the thing itself, but the story we tell around it. As William Shakespeare put it, “Nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
A startup friend of mine started chatting with me about his “new” idea. “I know there are many bad ideas in cypto, but I’ve been thinking,” he said, lowering his voice like he was about to reveal a state secret. “What if every email required you to buy a little crypto? Like, just a tiny amount. It would totally solve the spam problem.”
“This is how you hug,” my mother-in-law said to my teenage son. She wrapped her arms around him firmly, holding him tight and lingering just long enough to make her point. My son froze, his shoulders stiff and uncertain, his face fixed in an awkward smile. Gradually, his expression softened as he hugged her back—whether it was a reluctant acknowledgment that Grandma might be right or simply a concession so that he could get back to playing Fortnite.
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