Thinking New

Minarets High School, situated in rural Central California, stands as a beacon of innovative education, proving that small schools can lead the way in reinventing high school learning. Born from the need for a local school and a desire to offer something distinct from neighboring districts, Minarets was founded with a vision for digital, project-based learning and has since earned recognition from major organizations like Apple and Google. Its foundation rests on flexibility, choice, and a commitment to fostering student agency, qualities that have attracted both accolades and enthusiastic student participation.

Central to Minarets’ approach is its embrace of technology and forward-thinking educational practices. As one of the first one-to-one laptop public high schools in California, students navigate a digital, student-driven curriculum rich in real-world experiences. Career pathways are embedded within Arts, Media & Entertainment, and Agriculture & Natural Resources, complemented by electives like Singer/Songwriter, Show Band, and even entrepreneurial courses such as Kickstarter. The school’s unconventional schedule, later start times and unique events like Community Days, encourage creativity, engagement, and meaningful connection.

A defining feature of Minarets is its genuine celebration of student voice and growth. The Student Bill of Rights and regular student surveys set a standard for open dialogue and dignity between students and staff, creating a safe environment for feedback and new ideas. Culminating experiences like Personal Brand Equity portfolios and the Senior Legacy Experience push students to showcase learning, set goals, and undertake passion projects connected to their community, equipping them with skills in communication, leadership, and problem-solving.

Looking ahead, Minarets remains committed to its founding principle of innovation, refusing to settle for standard metrics of success. Principal Rhonda Corippo and her team continuously question traditional models and empower students to help chart the school’s path forward. Thanks to this culture of listening, experimentation, and student empowerment, Minarets High School represents a compelling model for educators nationwide on how to create learning environments where every student can thrive.

Seeking Return

Park Slope’s iconic brownstones which have featured in countless movies are seeing a new wave of multigenerational living, with adult children and their families moving back in with parents, but this time under different circumstances. Families who bought homes decades ago for a fraction of current values now find their grown children returning, driven by high rents, a tight housing market, and the appeal of living in a familiar neighborhood.

The story highlights several families, like writer Una LaMarche’s, whose own move was largely shaped by her mother’s foresight and a sudden lease loss. She now lives in the upstairs duplex, while her mother occupies the garden apartment below, a reversal of the sneaky entrances of her youth. The arrangement brings both convenience ("I had to call my mom to let me in") and nostalgia, plus access to space that would otherwise be unaffordable in today’s market. As such things go, people have to find a way to make count as a net positive in the minds for it to work.

Other examples include Ella, a cooking influencer who embraced living above her mom and dad’s apartment; and Vanessa, who returned during her father’s illness, finding both practical and emotional comfort. These returnees appreciate the support and proximity, easy shares of food, tech help, dog sitting, but also contend with the complications of family dynamics, finances, and ultimately inheritance questions. I am from a time when the multi-generational families around me in India were starting to fracture. The oldest generation rotated around between the children's families but generally had a home base with the oldest son's family. I am familiar with stories of families who really got it right and just about everyone came ahead because of the shared resources. But there are as many other stories that do not end well. 

The article explores how these close-knit arrangements shape relationships, responsibilities, and futures. Some families work out contracts to clarify equity and end-of-life care, aiming to minimize potential conflicts later. Putting homes into trusts, renovating into multiple units, and having open conversations are common strategies.

The homes that people left in India were not quite the prime real estate that Park Slope’s brownstones are. As such the return to nest was far more unlikely. It seems like the kids in this case are simply not to achieve the quality of life they enjoyed while dependent on their parents. A big part of the calculus to share a home with parents is driven by the desire to boost status. Not sure if that is anything to celebrate.

Culling Tools

Hopefully in McKinsey companies still trust and their leadership takes such reports under advisement atleast. The headline of the report is that the reality of post-pandemic work is more nuanced than absolute headlines about a “return to office” or “remote revolution” suggest. According to the latest McKinsey American Opportunity Survey, office attendance has stabilized around 30% below pre-pandemic rates, and nearly 40% of American workers report either full or partial remote arrangements, a sharp but not total departure from traditional office norms. Flexible work, including hybrid schedules, remote days, and accommodative arrangements like flexible hours or job sharing, has become a persistent preference, now ranking among the top reasons workers seek or switch jobs.

This shift isn’t uniform across groups. Higher-income and better-educated workers are both more likely to prefer and have access to remote work, underlining the continued value of flexibility as a way for employers to attract and retain top talent. Women, regardless of whether they have children, are even more likely than men to desire remote work, often citing increased productivity and reduced burnout among the benefits. Meanwhile, the youngest workers express slightly less preference for remote work, appreciating on-site opportunities for mentorship and camaraderie, though they also report the largest gap between their remote preferences and reality.

The rise of flexible work is reshaping not just HR, but also real estate. With employees less likely to commute daily, demand for traditional office space has softened, especially in downtown cores. Real estate owners and operators are responding by designing more adaptable and tech-enabled offices, prioritizing amenities and layouts that foster collaboration, community, and well-being. Residential and mixed-use developers are also pivoting, providing everything from home-office upgrades to vibrant suburban districts designed to meet the needs of populations spending more time close to home.

Ultimately, the lasting legacy of flexible work arrangements is a new equilibrium, one that challenges both companies and real estate providers to move past one-size-fits-all approaches. The most successful organizations will be those that embrace tailored work models, invest in supportive infrastructure, and rethink what “workplace” means to better match the evolving needs and aspirations of modern talent. With the right strategies, this realignment offers major opportunities, for employers seeking talent, for workers seeking balance, and for cities and suburbs looking to reinvent themselves for a flexible future. In the tech industry many companies have combination of adopt AI or else and some variant RTO all days of the week or else has been used a blunt instrument to make up for deficient leadership grasping for straws as they flail around trying to meet the rising tide of stakeholder expectations. McKinsey can opine away for all they care, they still need the rough culling tools to reduce their operational bloat. 

Getting Real

We watched Something's Got to Give for the first time a few weeks ago and were chatting about how the caliber of the cast makes what would have otherwise been a garden variety chick-flick, actually shine. I could not image an cast of AI actors being able to match the performance. Emily Blunt, a leading figure in Hollywood, has spoken out strongly against the rise of AI-generated performers, particularly after seeing images of the virtual actress Tilly Norwood. Blunt’s reaction was one of visible alarm, calling the prospect of AI “stars” both “really, really scary” and a direct threat to the human heart of storytelling. She urged Hollywood’s agencies not to sign AI talent, emphasizing that such characters remove the emotional depth and connection that only humans can bring to the screen.

Tilly Norwood was created by Xicoia AI and actress-entrepreneur Eline Van der Velden, who unveiled the character at the Zurich Film Festival and touted her as “the next Scarlett Johansson.” The AI actress, constructed from composites of several young celebrities, immediately drew attention from talent agencies, igniting a firestorm of debate in the industry. Critics, including former child star Mara Wilson, raised ethical questions about the use of hundreds of real women’s faces to generate Tilly, arguing that these opportunities should go to real actors.

The Screen Actors Guild (SAG-AFTRA) also weighed in, dismissing Tilly Norwood as a computer-generated character with no real life, emotion, or experience. The union argued that while studios may find such entities appealing for their low cost and consistency, audiences remain fundamentally interested in authentic human performances grounded in real experience and emotion, qualities AI cannot replicate.

Yet this backlash overlooks the potential creative and practical advantages of AI-generated performers. Proponents like Van der Velden argue that characters like Tilly Norwood represent not a replacement but a new artistic medium, a form of digital sculpture or animated art. Throughout history, technological advancements have been met with skepticism, yet many become tools for new forms of expression and storytelling. AI talent offers opportunities for experimental narratives, digital activism, and global collaborations unconstrained by physical limitations. Rather than seeing AI as the end of human storytelling, we might view it as a collaborative tool, one that, in the right hands, can expand the canvas of cinematic art, much as animation, CGI, or even sound recording once did. The debate isn’t about erasing humanity from the arts, but about what new stories creative minds can tell with these tools. There is some merit to that argument.

Faded Glory

Almost no conversation with my mother is complete without her bemoaning the fate of Kolkata and how she hold no hope for anything changing for the better in her lifetime. She is known to be prone to hyperbole as a good old fashioned Bangali should be, but reading this post on LinkedIn was a different perspective on the topic from someone who has deep roots in the city.

As the author says, Kolkata, once the beating heart of British India and a cradle of South Asian intellectual and commercial life, has experienced a dramatic arc of promise, stagnation, and disillusionment. The city’s rise was marked by grand ambitions, cosmopolitan culture, and economic opportunity, drawing migrants from across the country to its thriving streets. For families like the author’s, Kolkata symbolized a leap into modernity and hope, an urban refuge where dreams could flourish and contributions mattered. This was all likely true even when my grandparents' were young.

The seeds of decline were sown when the British shifted the capital to Delhi in 1912, but the decisive blows came from within. The post-independence power wielded by Kolkata’s Bhadralok elite and, later, three decades of Marxist rule. The combination proved highly toxic. Instead of progress, political leadership imposed red tape, labor unrest, and an aversion to industry, freezing the city in outdated ideology as other Indian metropolises sprinted ahead. The resulting economic decay, factories shuttering, unemployment soaring, and GDP growth trailing cities like Bengaluru and Hyderabad, turned Kolkata’s golden age into a relic. This is the Kolkata I have kwon for as long as I can remember. The decline was steady but relentless. My mother claims is has accelerated into free fall now. I cannot speak to the validity of her claims since I haven't lived there for decades.

These forces of neglect were compounded by violence and lawlessness, affecting not only the city’s physical landscape but also the lives of families who had invested generations of work and hope. Personal stories, such as the near-fatal assault on the author’s father, a revered business leader, underscore how a culture of disorder displaced the city’s former commercial ethos. Areas once bustling with legitimate trade fell prey to extortion, chaos, and political strongmen. This betrayal left many families, including the author’s, with little choice but to leave, seeking dignity and opportunity elsewhere.

Yet, amidst the decay, Kolkata clings to a bittersweet hope. Communal rituals like the Pujo celebrations briefly revive the city’s old spirit, even as nostalgia battles with present-day disillusionment. Even that is tenuous at best. Most people I know including my parents leave the city well before Puja and return once things quiet down after Dashami. They don't like how loud, crowded, chaotic and commercial the whole thing has become. This is not the Pujo they knew and loved. Today, Kolkata stands as a poignant testament to squandered potential, a metropolis weighed down by its own history, yearning for revival but mired in the consequences of leadership failures and societal complacency. Its story is both a warning and a plea, echoing the universal human struggle between promise and betrayal, memory and forgetting. Maybe there is a reason my mother cannot stop talking about the fate of this city where she was born and is still home to her. 

Decentering Men

Unbeknownst to me, given my demographic In 2025, the phrase “decentering men” has gone from niche feminist theory to mainstream mantra, slipping into everyday conversations, TikTok stitches, and even celebrity interviews. I was not even familiar with the word or the concept it tries to clarify. Ran into this while reading something unrelated a couple of days ago.

It was coined by writer Sherese (Charlie) Taylor in 2019, the concept describes a deliberate refusal to let men or the cultural expectation of male approval, remain at the center of a woman’s thoughts, decisions, self-worth, or life plan. From what I was able to glean, this is not a catchy slogan dreamed up for viral soundbites (as it seems to be at first blush); instead it is a political response to the quiet rage many women feel after years of shrinking themselves to fit the shape patriarchy carved out for them. Taylor calls it the exhaustion of living at eighty-five percent, always waiting for permission to take up full space.

The exhaustion has reached a breaking point. The reversal of reproductive rights, the mainstreaming of incel rhetoric, the resurgence of tradwife aesthetics dressed up as empowerment have had a snowball effect of sorts. In this context, women are watching their safety, autonomy, and labor be treated as negotiable. At the same time, many now have the economic and social freedom previous generations could only dream of. Singlehood is no longer an automatic financial death sentence, and that shift has forced a reckoning: if we can finally survive and even thrive without male partnership, why are we still taught that our power comes from proximity to men? If financial independence is the north star for a woman then a man does not need to have any role in it at all. This has been true for a long time for many women though it can be argued that more women are now able to have such independence than was possible before.

Decentering men, then, is the practice of unlearning that lie that men are the center of the universe and critically required in a woman's life. It means interrogating every inherited belief that a boyfriend, husband, or ring is the ultimate prize, the final destination, the proof that you are worthy. It means noticing how often women orient their schedules, style, ambitions, and emotions around being chosen, and choosing instead to orient around themselves. The phrase resonates because it names something millions of women have felt but never had language for: the relief of waking up and realizing the day does not have to revolve around what some man might think.

A common misunderstanding is that decentering men requires swearing off dating, sex, or love with men entirely. It does not. You can still desire partnership, still fall in love, still post a blurry hand on a steering wheel if that’s your vibe. The difference is that the relationship no longer gets to colonize the rest of your life. You stop accepting mediocre treatment because “at least he picked me,” stop staying in draining dynamics to avoid the stigma of being single, stop treating exes as evidence that good love doesn’t exist. The bar simply rises: a man is welcome in your world only if he adds to a life that is already full, never if he requires you to make yourself smaller.

This is why the trend feels so threatening to some and so liberating to others. When women stop treating male attention as the sun around which their planets must orbit, entire systems built on female self-sacrifice begin to wobble. Dating becomes less about auditioning for validation and more about mutual enrichment. Friendships, creativity, rest, and ambition reclaim the center stage they were always meant to have.

I hope the trend is not inclusive of fathers, brothers and male friends and mentors a woman has in her life. That would be a bit of bathwaterism in many cases.

Interviewing Robots

I have interviewed atleast three candidates in the last six months that had AI assisting them in real-time during the interview. It left me feeling like I was talking to a robot not a human. It does not surprise me that artificial intelligence is fundamentally reshaping the job search process, prompting many companies to revert to an old-school hiring solution: the in-person interview. As virtual interviews became ubiquitous, especially for remote and technical roles, employers noticed a rise in candidates using AI to cheat, such as feeding off-screen answers into coding tests or, in rare cases, even using deepfakes to impersonate job seekers online. High-profile firms like Cisco, McKinsey, and Google have now started requiring face-to-face meetings for some positions, aiming to ensure skills are real and credentials are genuine.

The current climate is described as an “AI arms race,” with both sides, job seekers and employers, leveraging technology in escalating ways. Companies use advanced software to filter applicants and automate the hiring funnel, while frustrated candidates employ AI tools to churn out optimized applications and ace digital interviews, sometimes crossing into outright fraud. The increasing sophistication of AI-generated fakery, combined with fresh warnings from the FBI about international scams, has made identity and skill verification more urgent than ever.

To combat these risks, employers are not only returning to in-person interviews but also investing in biometric identification, collaboration with platforms like Clear, and vigilant screening for signs of digital manipulation. Recruiters report that even the mere mention of an in-person interview can deter would-be scammers, and that up-close interactions often reveal qualities and potential red flags that video screens frequently conceal. The widespread adoption of these safeguards marks a shift in the balance between digital convenience and the human factors required for genuine trust.

This evolution reflects a new reality: as AI blurs boundaries between real and fake, face-to-face meetings reclaim their old role as the gold standard for authenticating candidates and cultural fit. The hiring process is coming “full circle,” exposing both the risks of over-reliance on algorithms and the renewed value of direct human connection in an increasingly mediated world. For candidates and recruiters alike, the message is clear, authenticity and good judgment matter more than ever in the age of AI-driven job applications.