When did you last stop cold — at a beetle on a leaf, a sudden snowfall, the moment the strings come in? Kids do it constantly. Most adults have quietly trained themselves out of it. After falling hard for Wowsabout!, the new PBS Kids and Jim Henson special about awe, I looked up the research behind the show. Dr. Dacher Keltner's fifteen-plus years studying awe as a distinct, measurable emotion. His case is that wonder isn't a luxury good — it's a trainable, mostly free human capacity we've been starving ourselves of. Here's how to borrow it back from the nearest four-year-old.

Let’s look at the stories behind two headlines from last week. The first, a guest essay by the Wharton organizational psychologist Adam Grant and his colleagues Marissa Shandell and Courtney Elliott, is titled "The Secret Reason Bosses Want Everyone Back in the Office, Every Day of the Week." Their six years of research lands on an uncomfortable finding. The trait that most reliably predicts a leader's hostility to remote work isn't a concern for productivity, collaboration, or culture. It's narcissism. Across executives and frontline supervisors, the people who most wanted everyone back five days a week were the ones who scored highest on self-importance, entitlement, and the craving for status.

A newspaper headline of the time put it bluntly: “Has [Sir Arthur] Conan Doyle gone mad?” Well, I suppose that depends on your understanding of madness. Doyle took a piece of media and, with the full force of an exceptional intellect, used it to confirm something he already, desperately needed to be true. Under that definition, who among us isn't mad?

Most professionals default to the summary because it’s what we were taught, what we’re used to seeing, and what feels expected.  A professional summary is grounded in evidence and hard-won experience. But trotting out your accomplishments is not the same thing as making a compelling case. To clarify your value and advocate for the context when you do your best work, you’ve got to think like a brand strategist.

It's not small talk vs. deep talk. It's forced small talk vs. genuine small talk, and both vs. substantive conversation. When small talk is authentic — when you're actually curious about the answer to "how's your day going?" — it works. When it's a performative obligation, it drains us.

An attribute was the single object — occasionally the single gesture or animal — that told a viewer which saint they were looking at. It was visual shorthand, compressed from an entire hagiography into one recognizable element. Catherine’s wheel: the instrument of her attempted martyrdom. Jerome’s lion: the wild animal he calmed in the desert by pulling a thorn from its paw. Stephen’s stones: the instrument of his execution following accusations of blasphemy.