(You can also read this on my personal blog here: How to take a sabbatical) This won’t be like every other blog post about travel. Your narrator won’t be casually doing something awesome when suddenly there is a life-changing revelation. That’s not how life actually works. This, instead, is an…

In January, Medium founder Ev Williams announced that despite his company’s efforts to better the news industry, it would refocus. The reason? We believe there are millions of thinking people who want to deepen their understanding of the world and are dissatisfied with what they get from traditional news and…

Most philosophical and political disagreements don’t take place in courtrooms, they take place using a series of text boxes levied against an often-anonymous opponent. …

2016 marked the seventh anniversary of 99U: a website, magazine, conference and book series dedicated to helping people make their ideas happen—and the publication I’ve worked on in various roles since September 2012. …

One of the great parts about being a millennial is that everyone else likes to tell you what you are and aren’t like and what does and doesn’t represent you. It’s the best. It’s American tradition to anoint pop culture figures as being totally representative of a generation. Typically (though…

Is it possible we’re not right about everything? — This story is part of the Internet Time Machine, a collection about life online in the 2010s. There’s a fun game I like to play in a group of trusted friends called “Controversial Opinion.” The rules are simple: Don’t talk about what was shared during Controversial Opinion afterward and you…

Tyler, The Creator changed the way I look at my job — It was then, by all accounts, his group Odd Future spent the day running around the Buzzfeed offices “terrorizing” the group of writers and editors plugging away on everyone’s favorite content machine. He ran around in a Batman mask and fired a nerf gun goading the workers to have some…

Earlier this month at the 99U Conference, ThinkUp co-founder Anil Dash spoke on the trajectory of careers: “Someone opened the door for you, they replied to your email, had coffee with you, interviewed you…that’s something that changed the direction of your career,” he said. He challenged the audience to share…

Last month, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen posted what, in his view, was the future of the news business. Reactions were varied, but everyone had one. I joked that my entire Twitter stream was people replying to Andreessen as he has very publicly thrown himself into the future of news conversation. …