Posts
Hazelnuts, sugar, egg-whites, & salt
https://www.marcellinaincucina.com/pavlova-daring-kitchen-challenge-for/
Thursday, July 23, 2026
Sue Coe: Paintings, Drawings & Prints A pencil is cheap and can be carried anywhere, behind an ear, along with a scrap of paper. Art can happen, function as visual journalism, a record. I draw every day. If you stand on any street corner for twelve hours making a drawing every ten minutes you are recording social and political life in the way of a witness.
“Work is finding yourself alone at the track when the weather kept everyone else indoors. Work is pushing through the pain and crappy first drafts and prototypes. It is ignoring whatever plaudits others are getting, and more importantly, ignoring whatever plaudits you may be getting. Because there is work to be done. Work doesn’t want to be good. It is made so, despite the headwind.” ― Ryan Holiday, Ego Is the Enemy
Wholegrain Pumpkin Buttermilk Muffins
https://totaste.com/recipe/pumpkin-muffins/
Whole Wheat Pumpkin Muffins
This is a variation of our whole wheat muffins base recipe.
These easy whole wheat pumpkin muffins use one full can of pumpkin, so
they are extra moist AND you won't be stuck with an awkward leftover
amount of pumpkin!
Ingredients
- 1 ½ cups white whole wheat flour*
- ½ Tablespoon pumpkin pie spice
- 1 teaspoon baking powder
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- ½ teaspoon kosher salt
- ½ cup dark chocolate chips (optional)
- 1, 15-ounce can pumpkin puree
- ½ cup packed brown sugar
- ¼ cup canola oil
- 2 large eggs
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 350° F. Prepare a 12-cup muffin pan with nonstick spray or muffin liners.
- In a large bowl, gently whisk whole wheat flour, pumpkin spice, baking powder, baking soda, salt. Add chocolate chips and toss to evenly coat.
- In a separate large bowl, whisk pumpkin, sugar, oil, eggs, and vanilla until combined.
- Add liquid ingredients to flour mixture. Using a spatula, fold ingredients until just moistened. Do not overmix.
- Portion ~¼ cup batter into each cup. Bake 18-20 minutes or until slightly golden and a toothpick inserted into the middle comes out clean. Enjoy!
Notes
*Substitute 1 cup whole wheat flour and 1/2 cup all purpose flour.
Our whole wheat muffins base recipe calls
for buttermilk, but we replaced it with the full can of pumpkin puree so
that you're not left with an awkward amount of pumpkin puree in the
refrigerator. You are welcome to follow the base recipe formula and use 1
cup of puree and 1/2 cup buttermilk if that is your preference. Use the
leftover pumpkin puree in our pumpkin pie smoothie!
Nutrition
Serving: 1muffinCalories: 190kcalCarbohydrates: 28gProtein: 4gFat: 7gSaturated Fat: 2.5gPolyunsaturated Fat: 1.5gMonounsaturated Fat: 2.5gCholesterol: 35mgSodium: 190mgPotassium: 150mgFiber: 3gSugar: 12gVitamin A: 700IUVitamin C: 1mgCalcium: 25mgIron: 1.1mg
The Ship That Turned Back David Lundstedt (glitch no sound yet)
'The Ship That Turned Back is a "documemory" film about the acclaimed filmmaker Irving Saraf's dramatic childhood escape as a seven-year-old Jewish boy from Nazi-occupied Poland in 1939. Irving's memories are explored in parallax, through the dual lens of the boy who experienced it and the old man who tells the story to his grandchildren. Childhood recollections merge with family dramatizations, children's illustrations and historical clips in this genre-bending documentary. David Lundstedt
Happy Birthday Raymond Chandler (Writer's Almanac)
And it’s the birthday of crime novelist Raymond Chandler, born in Chicago (1888). He wrote seven novels featuring detective Philip Marlowe, including The Big Sleep (1939), Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The Little Sister (1949), and The Long Goodbye (1954). He also wrote screenplays, including such film noir classics as Double Indemnity (1944), The Blue Dahlia (1946), and Strangers on a Train (1951).
Though he was born in Chicago, Chandler grew up in England and Ireland. His parents divorced, and he and his mother moved to London in 1895; her brother, a lawyer, supported them. Chandler went to a prestigious prep school and had dreams of becoming a lawyer, but his uncle couldn’t or wouldn’t pay for his education. So Chandler went to work to support the family, and in his spare time he wrote poetry, which he later described “B-grade.” He managed to publish 27 of his poems, though, as well as a short story called “The Rose-Leaf Romance.” He returned to the United States in 1912; one of his fellow passengers on the ship from England suggested he try California, so Chandler settled in Los Angeles, where he took a series of odd jobs like stringing tennis rackets, picking fruit, and keeping the books for a creamery. He joined the Canadian army during World War I and served on the front lines in France. After the war, he returned to California, married a woman 18 years his senior, and took a job as a bookkeeper for an oil company. Eventually, he worked his way up to vice president of the company.
The Great Depression, job stress, and his wife’s failing health all took a toll on Chandler. He started drinking heavily, and philandering. When he was fired from the oil company in 1932, he started writing again. He decided the best way to make a quick buck would be to write pulp fiction. He wasn’t great at coming up with plots, so he studied stories in detective magazines and tinkered with their plots to come up with his own. But his writing was top-notch; when he sold his first story — the 18,000-word “Blackmailers Don’t Shoot” — it was so polished and flawless that editors congratulated themselves on their discovery of the next literary genius. He published 26 short stories in all, and with similar attention to detail. When he broke the rules of grammar, he did so consciously, as he wrote to the editor of Atlantic Monthly: “By the way, would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss-waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will remain split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of barroom vernacular, this is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed and attentive. The method may not be perfect, but it is all I have.”
He wrote his first novel in three months. That was The Big Sleep (1939), and it was made into a classic of film noir, starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, in 1946. William Faulkner co-wrote the screenplay. The Big Sleep introduced readers to the gumshoe hero Philip Marlowe. Chandler described him as “a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor — by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and good enough for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things.”
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Tribute to Film Maker Allie Light
https://vimeo.com/1153248260?fl=pl&fe=sh
https://www.wmm.com/uploads/2019/02/rachelsdaughters.pdf
In Memoriam: Allie Light
We are deeply saddened by the passing of longtime WMM filmmaker, and dear friend, Allie Light, an artist, storyteller, educator whose whose work had a deep impact of the lives of many independent filmmakers, students, and the audiences who saw her film, in the landscape of documentary filmmaking.
Allie was a force of creativity and compassion, known for her generosity, humor, and unwavering belief in the power of women’s voices as well as her award-winning films. Together with her partner, the late Irving Saraf, Allie created a remarkable body of work that gave visibility and dignity to women’s stories often left untold. Their film IN THE SHADOW OF THE STARS won the 1991 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, and she later received a National Emmy Award for DIALOGUES WITH MADWOMEN — a groundbreaking exploration of women and mental health that continues to resonate today.
Over the years, she and Irving made many unforgettable films, including RACHEL’S DAUGHTERS: SEARCHING FOR THE CAUSES OF BREAST CANCER, MITSUYE AND NELLIE, THE SERMONS OF SISTER JANE, and BLIND SPOT: MURDER BY WOMEN. Beyond film, Allie was also a gifted poet and editor, authoring The Glittering Cave and editing Poetry from Violence, an anthology of women’s writings.
Allie was an active member of the San Francisco film community and was known for her generosity and mentoring. Many considered her the “godmother”. As Gary Meyer, founder of Landmark theatres and co-Director of the Telluride Film Festival, said when interviewed about her, “When you went to a film festival, she was always surrounded by other filmmakers. She had influenced so many of them and they just loved being in her presence.”
Allie and Irving deeply cherished Women Make Movies and often shared how much they valued being part of our community. We are honored to have worked alongside her and to distribute 5 of the films that carry her vision forward. She will be profoundly missed.
You Can’t Simply Decide to Be a Different Person
Forming new habits isn’t impossible, but it’s much easier for some people than others.
When I was a kid, my dad did something on family vacations that perplexes me to this day: He ran. Every day, at least four or five miles, rising before the sun and before anyone else was awake. He wasn’t training for anything. He wasn’t trying to lose weight. There was no specific goal, no endpoint, no particular reason he couldn’t take the week off while in the greater Disney World metropolitan area, which, in July, is hotter than the surface of the sun. He was just running, like he had basically every day since time immemorial. My dad will turn 75 next week, and whenever you’re reading this, he has probably already been out for a run today.
My dad didn’t always run. He started a few years before I was born. One day he wasn’t a jogger, and the next day he was, even if he didn’t know at the time that the change was indeed permanent. When I asked him why he started all those years ago, there was no great motivator, no epiphany. “It was the cool thing to do at the time for people like me,” he said of the 1980s fitness boom. Now, when my dad doesn’t run, “I feel like I’ve lost something,” he told me.
For a lot of people, this is, without exaggeration, the dream: You decide you’d like to start doing something, you get past the initial phase of this new activity being hard and bad and a huge bummer, and then you do that thing for 40 years. It’s a deceptively simple fantasy—and, so often, an impossible one. Right now, I work out once or twice a week, which is less than I’d like to. I’ve tried to form various exercise habits over the years—I bought the equipment, I made a plan, I got out there and did it—and never quite reached the automatic stage, even though I observed it at close range for my entire childhood. My experience is extremely common among people who want to change how they do all kinds of things: to waste less money, to floss, to quit smoking, to drink less, to learn a new language. And it’s a salient dynamic at the beginning of a new year, resolution or not. New beginnings are seductive, and so is our own capacity for change. You tell yourself that, this time, you’re really going to do God-knows-what differently, but all too soon you’re reminded that forever is a pretty long time to keep it up.
Stories like my dad’s often serve as pop-psychological proof that you, too, could become a runner, if you really wanted to. But we all want things—human longing knows no bounds—and plenty of people do genuinely throw themselves into trying something new, without much success at converting those behaviors into lasting habits. If some people can just get up one day and decide to behave differently for the rest of their life, why do most people fail at it again and again?
The conventional wisdom on changing habits goes something like this: You can change if you really want to. Americans especially tend to see ourselves and one another as individuals with identical reservoirs of willpower, which some people choose to use and others do not. If you can’t figure out how to get up at 4:30 in the morning to make sure you get five miles in before commuting to work every day, which my dad somehow did for 30 years, you’re not trying hard enough, or you don’t want it badly enough, or you’re not motivated enough. Try harder.
Now, as anyone who has ever tried anything might suspect, it sure seems like that idea might be bullshit. Or at least, many researchers have concluded that it does not account for an enormous amount of observed human behavior, according to the psychologist Wendy Wood. In her book Good Habit, Bad Habit, she explains that for the latter half of the 20th century, psychological scholarship more or less affirmed its righteousness. Attitude leads behavior, the theory went, and the circumstances in which you exist aren’t that important to the choices you make. Individuals do certain things and not others mostly because of their own conscious decisions; your fate is largely in your own hands. You can see how this logic permeated culture: The self-help and diet industries boomed, the government slashed the social safety net’s tires, the 1970s became the Me Decade.
In the past 20 years, the field’s tune has begun to change. According to Michael Inzlicht, a social psychologist at the University of Toronto, the most recent research suggests that conscious decision making plays a much more minor role in people’s actions than previously thought, and long-term behavior patterns largely aren’t created by stringing together a series of conscious choices. How people use the phrase self-control, he told me, tends to conflate two different things: a largely immutable element of someone’s personality (a trait) and a way that someone chooses to behave at a particular time (a state). Trait self-control varies from person to person, he said, and the amount you get is probably determined by some combination of heredity, culture, and environment. A person who has high trait self-control might be preternaturally punctual, whereas the timeliness track record of an average person—even one constantly trying hard to make it to things on time—might be more subject to the whims of circumstance.
The key distinction here, Inzlicht told me, is that a person who appears highly self-controlled to others—who is displaying a high level of trait self-control—probably isn’t exercising their behavioral self-control as much as you do. “People who have high trait self-control, they don’t actually engage in more restraint of their behavior and thoughts and emotions in the moment,” he said. Instead, they just aren’t tempted or distracted or diverted from their purpose as often or as effectively as the rest of us. For the small number of people at the far end of the trait spectrum, the things that others have to exercise self-control to resist every single time—sleeping in, skipping the gym, making impulsive purchases, having a cigarette even though they’re trying to quit—often just don’t get recognized as viable options in the same way that they do by the rest of us. This doesn’t mean it’s always easy for these people to sit down to study or to get out the door to exercise, but broadly speaking, they’re less readily pulled away from their plans by the siren song of novelty or opportunity, so they don’t have to rely on their active sense of restraint, with its far less reliable results, as frequently.
My father, I suspect, is one of the people at the far end of this personality continuum. It’s not just the running: He smoked for more than 20 years—back when everyone smoked, he would want me to stipulate—but he quit on his first try and never looked back. After he decided he liked running every morning, he added on an evening strength-training routine several days a week, and has stuck to the two-a-days for decades. He always eats breakfast, and the meal—a big bowl of Raisin Bran and a buttered, toasted bagel for much of my childhood—goes unchanged for years at a time. He is always reading a book, often about history, and has probably consumed hundreds of thousands of pages of dry descriptions of obscure military battles in my lifetime, for fun. He is what happens if you make the whole plane out of New Year’s resolutions.
Inzlicht described the evidence that any given person can increase their level of trait self-control to be more like my dad as “extremely weak,” but said that researchers should nonetheless still keep looking for ways it might be possible. Having the inherent ability to more easily form good habits and jettison harmful ones is enormously beneficial—people who can do that tend to be healthier, happier, and more financially stable. My dad is an easygoing, curious, nonjudgmental guy, and a very good dad. He’s not constantly working against himself to do the “right” thing, or to do anything at all. This is just how he is. “I don’t get out in that lane, I don’t get out in this lane, I stay in my lane,” he said, when I asked him about his routines. “These are the things that I like to do.”
According to Wood, the Good Habit, Bad Habit author, forming new long-term behavioral patterns is possible to some extent for most people, and it’s largely a function of learning to do something so automatically that you perform the task without having to consciously decide to do it, like brushing your teeth before you go to bed. She runs the University of Southern California’s Habit Lab, where she studies how and why people learn to change their behavior. She says that people who go to the gym a lot, for instance, don’t have to decide to go every time—they just sort of find themselves headed in that direction at the appropriate moment.
For those to whom habit-formation doesn’t come so naturally, the circumstances you’re in can make a big difference. Stability, for instance, is an enormous boon: Many people who leave work at the same time every day are able to rely on their routine as a cue to tell themselves that it’s time to go to the gym. If only half your workdays end when the gym is open, converting that choice to a habit can be much harder. Having money to buy the tools that make a new behavior easier or more rewarding is also enormously helpful, as is consistent access to the environs in which new tasks can best be performed. My dad started running on safe, low-traffic streets, which gave him the opportunity to realize that he really, really liked the rush of endorphins that is often called a runner’s high, which reinforced the creation of his new habit in ways that Wood has found to be crucial.
One study Wood described found that people who lived within four miles of a gym went much more frequently than people who lived farther away, even when the difference between the two groups was only a mile or two. Another study found that adding farm stands outside of schools and community centers in a low-income area of Austin, Texas, meant local residents ate more vegetables, even if nothing else was done to encourage people to change their dietary habits, or even to tell them the farm stands were there. “That’s part of the health advantage of higher-income folks,” Wood told me. “They live in environments that are more conducive to exercise; they’re less likely to live in food deserts; they have access to restaurants beyond just fast food.” For many people who make something out of their good intentions and healthy tendencies, those successes have been supported by policy choices that they had nothing to do with. To Wood, the implication is clear: If you want people to behave differently en masse, you’re going to have to change—to improve—the circumstances in which a lot of them live.
I do not mean to sound fatalistic here. It’s not that personal change or self-improvement is impossible—most people can change their habits and create new ones, according to Wood, if they set realistic goals and they’re able to create cues and rewards that effectively encourage repetition. Much of that involves tinkering with the circumstances of your existence that you can affect. For instance, I became a more frequent flosser by taking the package of floss out of my medicine cabinet and sitting it next to my toothbrush, where I could always see it. I used to procrastinate on washing dishes, but now I do them every day like clockwork, thanks to a Bluetooth speaker that I use to listen to podcasts while I stand at the sink. Having a clean kitchen, in turn, means I cook more—an activity I really enjoy—and resort to expensive takeout orders less frequently. I figured out what was stopping me from doing some of the things I knew I could do, and I tried to eliminate the obstacles I could control, to reasonable success. Figuring out how to do something a little less or a little more is likely to yield the best results for most people, even if it’s not going to turn you into a different human.
Before you do any of this, though, or before you decide you’ve failed, it’s probably worth making peace with who you are as a person. My irregular exercise habits don’t really bother me anymore, mostly because I do not take myself as seriously as I used to. I figure that I am who I am, give or take a reasonable capacity for marginal change. I have exercise equipment in my apartment that I could use more often, but I simply do not feel like it. I have never once felt like it, even if I have often wanted to be a person who does. What I can actually do for myself over the next year to make my life better probably will not include a spontaneous dedication to daily exercise. It may include more careful attention to, say, reading or cooking—things that I already love, and that are good for me. Before I left my parents’ house over the holidays, Dad made sure to pass on a few books he thought I’d enjoy. None of them is about war.
Amanda Mull is a staff writer at The Atlantic.
I figured I might as Well Make it Easier
"Okay kids let's drive until we hit snow!" My bio dad said showing up at our house with his 3rd wife and off we went. There was no heat or muffler in the big pale blue Oldsmobile. My sister and I huddled under a quilt in the back seat but we hated each other so we didn't capitalize on each others warmth. The muffler was too loud to be able to talk. I was sure they had a plan to toss me over the mountain at the scenic overlook. It would solve everyone's problems, I thought. When we stopped to see the view of the mountains I didn't bother to put my boots on, instead I asked my father to lift me up out of the back seat. I figured I might as well make it easier. (republished from 2015)
I started writing because I was compelled to. When I was 13 or so, I spent two or three hours a day writing in that adolescent, struggling, angst-ridden way. By the time I was 21 I'd spent so much time doing it that I allowed a small practical idea to enter my thoughts: Well, if I'm doing this so much, maybe I can make something of it. I was learning to write, learning what it took to write.
SUSAN MINOT
Wednesday, July 22, 2026
Let’s say you have a gondola with a hot air balloon on it, and it’s tethered to the ground with ropes. If you want to go up, don’t put more hot air in the balloon or more things that will lift it up. Basically, untie the tethers, and it will naturally go up …So, the right thing to do is not worry about going up—just let go of what’s holding you down. And, if you will let go of those tethers, believe me, your whole being will go up, naturally, exactly at the pace that it should. Everything will unfold perfectly, but you have to be willing to let go of what’s holding you down. Michael Singer
“All of a sudden you realize life is so simple: it unfolds in front of you, and you dance with it … The highest life you can live is that every single moment that unfolds in front of you is better off because it did.” — Michael Singer
“‘Hi, are you in there?’ Then the question is, ‘Who is aware that they are in there?’ Our tendency is to think that I am the body—I am this package of body, and mind, and emotions … Self-realization, in its simplest sense, is to say you have realized who is in there—you have realized that you are not your mind, you are not your emotions, you are not your body … Self-realization is that you have returned to the seat of being.” — Michael Singer
“The higher Self has freed itself of the bondage of the lower self by doing what? By knowing it’s not ‘me’, and I don’t have to spend my time servicing it. I can rest back into the nature of my being. That’s the beginning of true self-realization and true liberation.” — Michael Singer
“You are a great being, and that is true of every single person that walks the face of this earth … The fact that you took human birth means that your will and your soul is evolved enough to be transcendent to every single force that can draw on it.” — Michael Singer
“There is only one consciousness. Consciousness is not something that evolved through evolution. Consciousness is what was in the beginning and will be in the end; it is the beginning and end of reality.” — Michael Singer
“People don’t have a soul; they are the soul.” — Michael Singer
“If you’ve worked enough on yourself, you don’t need anything, you’re not looking for anything. It’s like the joy of interacting with life is what feeds you … You are complete and whole within yourself. You need nothing.” — Michael Singer
“If you are fulfilled, you don’t sit there and think what do I need in order to be okay … If you are living every experience fully, then death doesn’t take anything from you. There’s nothing to take because you’re already fulfilled. That’s why the wise being is always ready to die.” — Michael Singer
“There is nothing ‘bad,’ there’s just experiences that unfold that we learn from … Serve the moments that are unfolding in front of you.” — Michael Singer
“All of a sudden you realize life is so simple: it unfolds in front of you, and you dance with it … The highest life you can live is that every single moment that unfolds in front of you is better off because it did.” — Michael Singer
“The highest state you have ever experienced is simply the result of how open you were. If you don’t close, it can be like that all the time … unending inspiration, unending love, and unending openness. That is the natural state of a healthy heart.” — Michael Singer
“The highest technique is the technique of life—of using life to see that you’re closed to certain things and also that you’re open to certain things.” — Michael Singer
“The highest being who is most capable of solving the problems of this world is the one that can be at peace with every single thing that comes into them.” — Michael Singer
“The experiencer merges with the experience—that’s union.” — Michael Singer
“Creativity doesn’t come from the mind. Creativity pours into the mind, and then the mind analyzes it. Creativity comes from the Self; it comes from the deepest part of your being, from your center.” — Michael Singer
“Your will, the power you have, is stronger than any force that can ever distract you or do anything to you. You are the strongest thing in there. Will is the power of Self.” — Michael Singer
“You shouldn’t ever need a vacation. You should enjoy your life so much that every moment of it is as exciting as going anywhere else.” — Michael Singer
“It was like getting on a magic carpet following the flow of life instead of following the noise inside my head.” — Michael Singer
“‘Ego is the masquerading self’ (Yogananda) … In other words the facade you pulled over your consciousness to define yourself.” — Michael Singer
“I’ll do every single thing that a spiritual person would do, then I’m spiritual. No, you’re not, it’s nothing. It’s the biggest trap that could possibly exist … Do not try to put nice white lights around your garbage and sit there and say, ‘I’m pure’. That is spiritual ego.” — Michael Singer
“Defensiveness is the nature of ego.” — Michael Singer
“There should be no cage. The soul is infinite … Decorating your cage with beautiful experiences, fond memories, and great dreams is not the same as going beyond. A cage by any other name is still a cage. You must be willing to go beyond.” — Michael Singer
“What are you having a problem with? What you’re going to find out is you’re having a problem with your mind. Your mind has decided what you want to be happening and what you don’t want to be happening, and that’s what you’re having a problem with.” — Michael Singer
“Anger is anger, and it’s coming from a personal place. What it’s going to do is create more anger on the other side.” — Michael Singer
“What is a desire? Having a way you want it to be … The probability that the world in front of you is going to unfold exactly the way you decided you want it to be is zero.” — Michael Singer
“The cause of suffering is that you have a way you want it to be … The cause of suffering is that you decided how you want it to be and now you suffer when it’s not that way … You honestly believe that you get to make up what the moment in front of you should be like and that it really should be that way, and you get upset when it’s not that way, and therefore you suffer. — Michael Singer
“Suffering is a state of not being okay, a state of disturbance, and now I need to do things in order to try and make it so I’m not disturbed.” — Michael Singer
“Why am I not enjoying the journey of what’s going on? If you study that carefully and watch it, you’re going to see it is because you have limited your happiness to events being exactly the way you define them to be.” — Michael Singer
“Life is not bothering you. You are bothering yourself about life … This is more important than meditation. This is the most important thing. If you’re going to bother yourself about everything, what are ya gonna take 15 minutes and try to offset your whole day of bothering yourself? How about we learn to not bother ourselves?” — Michael Singer
“Are you dealing with the core, or are you dealing with the facade? We are all dealing with the facade and trying to get the outside world to support the facade so that we don’t have to deal with the core.” — Michael Singer
“What does it mean to grow personally? It means to notice that you have issues inside yourself. You think you have issues outside. No, you have issues inside … You don’t deal with what’s outside until you’ve dealt with what’s inside.” — Michael Singer
“Take the seat of objective observation and notice what is going on inside. Don’t judge what’s going on inside. Don’t decide what’s supposed to be going on inside. Just notice.” — Michael Singer
“You realize that you are not that part; you are the one who’s noticing that … The only part that is safe and consistent is you who’s noticing … You just notice that you’re noticing.” — Michael Singer
“Your relationship to what you see is always one of subject-object. You are the subject, and what you are looking at is the object. There are many different objects coming in through your senses, but there’s only one subject experiencing them—You … You have become separate from who you are because you’re busy paying attention to the object of consciousness instead of your seat of consciousness.” — Michael Singer
“The minute you notice, you relax. That’s the highest technique that exists … Over time you have created a space inside of you by relaxing into the seat of Self.” — Michael Singer
“Your spiritual being is transcendental. That being is independent of this world. It is watching the world, but it is not of this world. It is the consciousness that is aware of what it’s looking at.” — Michael Singer
“Start with what we call ‘witness consciousness’ … You are always the witness. You are always there … The highest growth and the one that really leads to deep spirituality is, ‘I’m the witness’ … I’m talking about the deepest state. I’m in the witness. I see what’s going on.” — Michael Singer
“Krishnamurti called it the ‘seat of objective observation’. But, you will not be willing to look at yourself objectively while you are judging yourself … Your consciousness has extricated itself from being in it. It didn’t get rid of it yet, but it can watch it, it can see it … Can you achieve a seat of objective observation where you are watching your mind?” — Michael Singer
“Don’t ever misunderstand what’s meant by objective observation or witness consciousness. It is not something you do, it is not an act of will, it is not a place you go—it is the state of being aware of what is going on inside your mind … You are not in your mind. You’re sitting on the couch of Self watching the mind just like you sit on the couch and watch the TV … Whatever the mind is saying, you are watching that.” — Michael Singer
“There’s another choice when the yickiness comes up inside and you are conscious of it—you are aware, you’re the witness—and you see that you’re not comfortable with it, let it go.” — Michael Singer
“Maintain your seat of witness consciousness. Things are going to happen which tend to pull you in; you’ll feel a tendency to get pulled in to the disturbance … Your consciousness gets drawn to the place of maximum disturbance.” — Michael Singer
“You are practicing what I call extricating your consciousness, freeing your consciousness, liberating your consciousness, from having to watch what’s going on in there.” — Michael Singer
”You are aware of these different aspects of your being; you are not an aspect of your being … If I take away what you’re aware of, you’re still aware that it’s not there. If I take away your awareness, it’s over, I’ve turned off the light, there’s nobody there. That’s who you are.” — Michael Singer
It’s the birthday of the man who said: “All I ever wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.” That’s painter Edward Hopper, born in Nyack, New York (1882). By the time he was 12, he was already six feet tall. He was skinny, gangly, made fun of by his classmates, painfully shy, and spent much of his time alone drawing.
After he finished art school, he took a trip to Paris and spent almost all of his time there alone, reading or painting. In Paris, he realized that he had fallen in love with light. He said the light in Paris was unlike anything he’d ever seen before. He tried to re-create it in his paintings.
He came back to New York and was employed as an illustrator at an ad agency, which he hated. In his spare time, he drove around and painted train stations and gas stations and corner saloons.
Hopper had only sold one painting by the time he was 40 years old, but his first major exhibition — in 1933 at the Museum of Modern Art — made his reputation. His pieces in that show had titles like Houses by the Railroad, Manhattan Bridge Loop, Room in Brooklyn, Roofs of Washington Square, Cold Storage Plant, Lonely House, and Girl on Bridge.
“If we pay attention, we will realize that every moment around us there is a world that we do not create—that’s been there for 13.8 billion years—and there are trillions of cells in your body that are doing what they’re supposed to do, all of nature, everything. And, you wake up and you realize, ‘I’m not doing any of this. I didn’t make my body, I didn’t make my mind think, I don’t make my heart beat, I don’t make my breath breathe—yet I have this notion that I have to make things happen. Yet, all throughout the universe things are happening everywhere, and I’m not doing them. So, why exactly am I the one that’s in charge of what’s unfolding in front of me?’ And, what you realize at some point, is that you’re not. That the moment in front of you that’s unfolding is no different than all the zillions of other moments that aren’t in front of you that are unfolding in accordance to the laws of nature, the laws of creation. So, you start to practice saying, ‘I don’t want to check inside of me first to see what I want and what I don’t want. I want to pay attention to what the universe is creating in front of me—just like it’s creating everywhere I’m not—and let me see how I can participate in that, be part of that, instead of interfering with it with my desires and my fears.’ That’s living from a place of surrender.” — Michael Singer
“Your relationship with God is the same as your relationship with the sun. If you hid from the sun for years and then chose to come out of your darkness, the sun would still be shining as if you had never left. You don’t need to apologize. You just pick your head up and look at the sun. It’s the same way when you decide to turn toward God—you just do it.”
“What if you knew that the next person you’d see would be the last person you would ever see? You’d be right there soaking it in, experiencing it. It wouldn’t matter what they were saying; you’d just enjoy hearing the words because it would be the last conversation you’d ever have. What if you brought that kind of awareness to every conversation? That’s what happens when you’re told that death is around the corner: you change, life doesn’t change.”
“It is truly a great cosmic paradox that one of the best teachers in all of life turns out to be death. No person or situation could ever teach you as much as death has to teach you. While someone could tell you that you are not your body, death shows you. While someone could remind you of the insignificance of the things that you cling to, death takes them all away in a second. While people can teach you that men and women of all races are equal and that there is no difference between the rich and the poor, death instantly makes us all the same.”
“It’s actually a shocking realization when you first notice that your
mind is constantly talking. You might even try to yell at it in a feeble
attempt to shut it up. But then you realize that’s the voice yelling at
the voice:”
―
The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself
“The psyche is built upon avoiding this pain, and as a result, it has fear of pain as its foundation. That is what caused the psyche to be. To understand this, notice that if the feeling of rejection is a major problem for you, you will fear experiences that cause rejection. That fear will become part of your psyche. Even though the actual events causing rejection are infrequent, you will have to deal with the fear of rejection all the time. That is how we create a pain that is always there. If you are doing something to avoid pain, then pain is running your life. All of your thoughts and feelings will be affected by your fears.”
“The most important thing in life is your inner energy. If you’re always tired and never enthused, then life is no fun. But if you’re always inspired and filled with energy, then every minute of every day is an exciting experience. Learn to work with these things. Through meditation, through awareness and willful efforts, you can learn to keep your centers open. You do this by just relaxing and releasing. You do this by not buying into the concept that there is anything worth closing over. Remember, if you love life, nothing is worth closing over.”
“When you feel pain, simply view it as energy. Just start seeing these inner experiences as energy passing through your heart and before the eye of your consciousness. Then relax. Do the opposite of contracting and closing. Relax and release. Relax your heart until you are actually face-to-face with the exact place where it hurts. Stay open and receptive so you can be present right where the tension is. You must be willing to be present right at the place of the tightness and pain, and then relax and go even deeper. This is very deep growth and transformation. But you will not want to do this. You will feel tremendous resistance to doing this, and that’s what makes it so powerful. As you relax and feel the resistance, the heart will want to pull away, to close, to protect, and to defend itself. Keep relaxing. Relax your shoulders and relax your heart. Let go and give room for the pain to pass through you. It’s just energy. Just see it as energy and let it go.”
“There is nothing more important to true growth than realizing
that you are not the voice of the mind - you are the one who hears it.”
― The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself
― The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself
“Eventually you will see that the real cause of problem is not
life itself. It's the commotion the mind makes about life that really
causes the problems.”
― The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself
― The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself
“How would you feel if someone outside really started talking to
you the way your inner voice does? How would you relate to a person who
opened their mouth to say everything your mental voice says? After a
very short period of time, you would tell them to leave and never come
back. But when your inner friend continuously speaks up, you don’t ever
tell it to leave. No matter how much trouble it causes, you listen.”
― The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself
― The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself
Imagine
“Imagine if you used relationships to get to know other people, rather than to satisfy what is blocked inside of you. If you’re not trying to make people fit into your preconceived notions of what you like and dislike, you will find that relationships are not really that difficult. If you’re not so busy judging and resisting people based upon what is blocked inside of you, you will find that they are much easier to get along with—and so are you. Letting go of yourself is the simplest way to get closer to others.”
“Instead of being encouraged to feel completely protected, loved, honored, and respected by the Divine Force, you've been taught that you're being judged. Because you've been taught that, you feel guilt and fear. But guilt and fear do not open you connection to the Divine; they only serve to close your heart. The reality is that God's way is love, and you can see this for yourself.”
You’re just standing on one little ball of dirt and spinning around one of the stars.
“To get some distance from this, you first need to get some perspective. Walk outside on a clear night and just look up into the sky. You are sitting on a planet spinning around in the middle of absolutely nowhere. Though you can only see a few thousand stars, there are hundreds of billions of stars in our Milky Way Galaxy alone. In fact, it is estimated that there are over a trillion stars in the Spiral Galaxy. And that galaxy would look like one star to us, if we could even see it. You’re just standing on one little ball of dirt and spinning around one of the stars. From that perspective, do you really care what people think about your clothes or your car? Do you really need to feel embarrassed if you forget someone’s name? How can you let these meaningless things cause pain? If you want out, if you want a decent life, you had better not devote your life to avoiding psychological pain. You had better not spend your life worrying about whether people like you or whether your car impresses people. What kind of life is that? It is a life of pain. You may not think that you feel pain that often, but you really do. To spend your life avoiding pain means it’s always right behind you.”
If you want out, if you want a decent life, you had better not devote
your life to avoiding psychological pain. You had better not spend your
life worrying about whether people like you or whether your car
impresses people. What kind of life is that? It is a life of pain. You
may not think that you feel pain that often, but you really do. To spend
your life avoiding pain means it’s always right behind you.”
―
The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself
“Your inner growth is completely dependent upon the realization
that the only way to find peace and contentment is to stop thinking
about yourself.”
― The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself
― The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself
“True personal growth is about transcending the part of you that is not okay and needs protection.”
― The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself
― The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself
Tuesday, July 21, 2026
Carlos Barragán
Fourteen-year-old Azeez used an alter ego, Vanessa, to trick lonely American men in romance scams.Carlos Barragán
Carlos
Barragán is a reporter and researcher for The New York Times and the
author of “The Yahoo Boys: Love, Deception, and the Real Lives of
Nigeria’s Romance Scammers.”
Most
nights, once his mother and baby sister had fallen asleep on the room’s
single bed, Azeez sat on the floor in the dark, pulled out his phone,
and tried to figure out how to extract money from a stranger on the
other side of the planet. He was 14. He lived in Ikotun, a neighborhood
in northwestern Lagos, Nigeria, where Azeez’s mother paid 4,000 naira a
month, about six dollars, for a space with a dirt floor just large
enough to fit a wardrobe and a bed. The men Azeez wrote to lived mostly
in California, which to him was an interesting, exotic place. When one
of them asked where she lived — “she” being his alter ego, Vanessa, a
blond American woman whose photographs he had lifted from a pornographic
actress’s online profile — Azeez would simply type the name of the
man’s town into Google alongside the words “thirty minutes away.”
He
was not good at it. For the first few months he made no money. He asked
for cash too early, or answered the wrong question, or went quiet when a
man said something he didn’t understand. Only a few months earlier, he
had been playing a video game called Truck Simulator, where he
had to pick up freight cargo in the United States and drop it at the
right address while obeying American traffic laws. Now he was learning
the country in a different way: just by its appetites. Azeez had never
had a girlfriend. He held only a childlike notion of what the men he
spent hours chatting with sought. Many of the lines he used on them came
from downloaded scripts.
I
know all this because I spent the better part of three years traveling
to Ikotun to interview dozens of Nigerian romance scammers, popularly
known as “Yahoo Boys,” a moniker tied to the Yahoo! email accounts they
used in the early 2000s. When I met Azeez, he agreed to patiently
reconstruct his own experience as a budding scammer. There was no crime
syndicate, no camp where elders trained recruits. There was only this: a
cheap phone, an older friend who advised him to stop wasting his life
on games and start making money like everyone else, and a folder of
scripts — known as “formats” — that he found by typing “dating maga
format” into the same search bar he used to figure out almost everything
else. (In the language of Nigerian romance scammers, “maga” is the word
for the mark; no relation to Donald Trump’s MAGA.) The formats describe
ways to seduce strangers with the goal of reaching a payout, which
usually involves coming up with excuses to convince the maga to buy a
gift card and share the code.
Azeez memorized them, the same way he had memorized the rules of the road in Truck Simulator.
I
had not come to Lagos to meet Azeez. I had come to find the man who had
tried to run a romance scam on my mother, and I never did. What I found
instead were thousands of young men and a few women, some barely older
than children, earning a living by scamming other people by pretending
to be their online lovers. I had expected either to be repelled by them
or to learn something sophisticated enough to account for how a woman as
sharp as my mother could’ve been taken in. Yet my interviewees
consistently disappointed me. They repeated the same three points: White
people are too trusting; white people fall in love too easily; the key
thing is attention.
I kept thinking: How could anyone be fooled by this?
It
took me a long time to understand that the boys were not failing to
explain the con. They were explaining it, and I was refusing to hear it:
their unsophisticated approach was the best way to exploit our
loneliness.
Alone again (naturally)
My
mother, a successful dentist, raised three sons largely alone after a
difficult divorce, moving us with aplomb through a series of rented
apartments in Madrid. When she told us, over Sunday lunch in December
2015, that she had met a man on Tinder, none of us thought much of it.
His name was Brian. He was a handsome American soldier of 52, deployed,
he said, to Syria.
As
the online relationship progressed, one of my brothers, an air force
pilot, scoffed at a soldier who could somehow never manage a video call.
After that, my mother grew quieter about Brian and confided mostly in
me. She showed me their emails, his studded with spelling and writing
errors. So what, I thought. The man is probably busy. Then Brian
announced that he would soon ship her several bars of gold he had
recovered from a terrorist’s stash — if only she could help with the
customs fees — and my brother messaged me: It’s a scam. I found an app
that could trace the email to the place it was sent from. Brian’s
messages were not coming from Syria. They were coming from Lagos. My
mother’s face went white. Within a week she had deleted everything and
announced, laughing, that she was done with men.
That
should have been the end of it. Then the pandemic came and my mother
grew anxious and then depressed. I broke the lockdown rules to spend
time with her. She would tell me she felt lonely as we watched the
evening news, the rising death count. And I, swamped and frightened and
self-pitying, would think: What about me? Am I invisible? I called her
selfish. You don’t understand what it’s like when no one needs you, she
replied. You don’t understand what it means to be alone.
The
truth was that the loneliness had been there long before Brian, and
before the pandemic. Even though she was intelligent and funny, she
could not find a suitable partner. She offered up various
justifications: The men of her generation couldn’t abide a woman who
outearned them. She was too particular. Or it was simply fate, some sort
of offset for the luck she’d had elsewhere in life. As she once put it
to me: “Is this the price I have to pay for having three wonderful
kids?”
And
here’s what a part of me did not want to examine: When a woman like my
mother is taken in by a scammer far away, we tell her story with a
curdled mix of pity and mockery, as though it were a failure of
individual intelligence rather than the predictable result of an
isolation we had watched build for years. We stigmatize the victim
partly so that we never have to ask how she came to be so vulnerable.
The hours
A
few years later, when I was living in New York, I interviewed many
victims. Their accounts of the scams were often baroque: shifting
characters, tangled subplots, elaborate criminal machinery. None of it
matched what I had seen and heard in my reporting in Nigeria. For a
while I couldn’t close the gap, until I realized what some of them were
doing: telling the story in such a way that having believed the scammer
would make sense. A sophisticated international operation can fool
anyone. A boy from the slums with a script, in theory, should not. So I
stopped asking the victims how the con had worked and started asking
about their lives. Some had no real family left. Many had not spoken to a
friend in years. Almost all of them lived online and carried old
wounds: a death, a divorce, a betrayal. When a beautiful, attentive
stranger contacted them and offered them a story, they held on to it.
Not because it was necessarily plausible but because it made them feel
seen. Every “good morning” offered a fresh reason to get out of bed.
In
the United States and Europe, romance scammers are often pictured as
foot soldiers of an international cartel. I once called the head of one
of the largest romance-scam victims’ groups in America. When I suggested
that the boys I had met in Lagos belonged to no mafia, he threatened to
hang up and told me I was a terrible reporter. Over time, I came to
understand his fury. H.L. Mencken wrote that “there is always a
well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and
wrong.” The cartel is that easy solution. It is easier to believe that
your father, your friend, or you yourself were defeated by an
international syndicate than by a hungry teenager with a smartphone, too
much time, and too little hope.
I
have come to realize that both victims and scammers distort their
experience in ways that mirror each other. The victim inflates the scam
into a vast conspiracy because in our society being the victim of a
conspiracy is worthy of empathy; being the victim of loneliness is not.
The scammer, on his side, deflates his crimes — it’s white people’s
fault, they just fall in love too easily, it’s payback for colonialism —
because the alternative would be to recognize that he is committing a
deeply shameful sin: stealing from someone’s vulnerable relative.
Only
once you accept that the person chatting up your relative might be any
man in his 20s, any boy who must ask an older friend what “doing a 69”
means, you can see that what beats us is not their sophistication. It is
our need. The scammer’s discovery is that what works is basic
attendance. “Good morning, babe!” is the most important message you can
send, a scammer told me.
This
is why they study us the way Azeez studied California — googling our
towns, learning our holidays, memorizing our breakfast routines — and
why they are, in a twisted sense, our most ruthless experts. They read
our isolation more clearly than we do because they come at it from the
outside. Their explanations sound banal to us because we cannot bear the
simple truth: that Nigeria’s poverty and lack of opportunity has led
thousands of young men to build lives shaped around our loneliness.
Even
the Yahoo Boys’ habits show this deformation: The more a scammer comes
to rely on the scam, the longer he must stay awake at night chatting
with clients in different time zones and the more drugs he must consume
to keep himself awake, squandering the money he stole. And it is a lot
of money, multiplied by the weakness of Nigeria’s currency. By 2022,
Americans were losing well over a billion dollars a year to romance fraud,
according to the Federal Trade Commission. Some of that is going to
Southeast Asia, where international syndicates have indeed enslaved
people to turn them into unlikely romance scammers; there, at least, the
popular conception of a sophisticated criminal syndicate is vindicated.
Another chunk is going to West Africa, where these boys are farming our
isolation with the implicit approval of the tech platforms.
Which,
of course, should not and does not absolve them. Their crimes are
serious — and have tragic consequences. But it’s still important to
remember that boys like Azeez have not had easy lives. Not long ago,
Azeez came to Lagos on a four-hour bus ride he took sitting on his
grandmother’s lap because they could afford only one seat; he was left
with a mother he barely knew, and for months he sat alone at the
entrance of his building watching strangers pass, with no one his age to
play with and no school willing to take him. He learned to read the
loneliness of men in California, I think, partly because he was fluent
in it himself. Western isolation on one side, Nigerian poverty on the
other. A phone set between them like a bridge, showing each of them a
distorted glimpse of the other’s life. A particularly morbid form of
connection.
A
child who scams a stranger out of a gift card is, in part, the product
of a country that has failed him. We should not absolve individuals of
their responsibility, and Azeez has certainly come to regret many of his
life choices (he has left scamming and is training to become a tailor).
But it’s impossible not to recognize that inflation and a collapsed
Nigerian economy offer young people scant opportunity. In the last few
years, those pressures have turned an activity once seen as a shameful
last resort into something a Lagos mother might now wish on her son even
if the returns are modest; Azeez made less than $200 in a year and a
half.
My
mother dated a little after Brian, but never seriously, and she will
still, now and then, mention that whenever she hears John Legend’s “All
of Me,” she thinks of him. For those few weeks, the man who did not
exist was her most attentive partner. He understood what she was starved
for and supplied it better than the world around her.
What
he could not do was keep her. Thank God. It was my brother who first
said the word “scam” and I who traced the emails to Lagos. We handled
all of it clumsily. And yet even at her loneliest, my mother had that:
people who were there for her. Many of the hardest-hit victims have no
one at all who will reach out. The question is: Why not? Who is
responsible? The answer might be scarier than we think.
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