Hi friends,

I’m writing with a heavy heart because one of my favorite writers, Tim Keller, passed away today.

The history and theology of Christianity has been my number one intellectual interest over the past five years, and Keller was my sherpa. Attending his Questioning Christianity lectures transformed the way I think about faith and led me to write pieces like "Why You're Christian" and "The Book You Need to Read." More recently, something like 80% of my YouTube watch minutes over the past three months have been devoted to his videos and lectures.

He's on my Mount Rushmore for people I’d like to emulate in my career. I'll never forget the way he so openly welcomed criticism. He exhibited a rare was his combination of conviction, compassion, and intellectual humility. I met him exactly one time, on the corner of 83rd and Broadway in Manhattan. He didn't just ask for the hard questions. He demanded them. Doing that over the course of a career taught him how to communicate the gospel with exceptional shrewdness.

Rest in peace.

Here are a few things before we get into today's Finds:

1. Writing Sprints: Is your writing journey at stand-still, blocked by frustration and procrastination? Well, I say, it's time for a little perspiration. Starting next month, I'm hosting intensive writing classes to take you from zero to published in a day. You'll workshop your idea, get feedback from trained editors, and publish online. It's like a workout class for your mind. And it'll be a blast! The first Writing Sprint will run on June 10, and enrollment opens May 31. Click the button below if you want to hear more about it.

2. Transforming Education by Writing: The principal of one of the most innovative schools in the world and the coolest K–12 school I know of in Austin texted me this week because he's looking to hire writers who can become thought leaders in the education space and grow the school's Twitter account. It's a golden opportunity for the right person. If you're passionate about education and want the job, email me with a ~500-word answer to three prompts: (1) prove you can write the lights out, (2) tell my why you're so passionate about education, and (3) show me you're the right person for the job.
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3. Gifted Minds Podcast: I interviewed on the Gifted Minds podcast about how to parent obsessive and hyper-active kids, based on my own experience as one of those kids. I loathed school. Feeling trapped for so much of my childhood led to overwhelming pain and broiling anger that could've been averted with a different approach to learning. Watch the full video here. (Listen here: Apple | Spotify)

Today's Finds

Because of Tim Keller's passing, I'm sharing links I've already shared before today and using the extra time to write something in his memory that I'll publish in the next few days.

​Trader Joe’s: A primer on my favorite supermarket, which sells more food per square foot than any other grocery store. They don’t just have customers. They have fans. Visiting the store is a little bit like thrift shopping because you always find something unexpected. It seems like every other week somebody swells with pride as they recommend some new Trader Joe’s product to me. It’s far more curated than other grocery stores too. Where typical grocery stores carry ~35,000 SKUs (stock-keeping units), Trader Joe’s only has ~3,000. Roughly 80% of those products have the Trader Joe’s name on the label too. Unlike other grocery stores, there are employees everywhere, no social media, no self-checkout lines, no customer loyalty programs, and no online ordering.

Formula One: One of my recipes for learning faster is to do something with people who are obsessed with that thing. It’s not just that ultra-passionate people know more than the average person. Even if they did, you can look up most information online. The benefit of surrounding yourself with passionate people is that their passion rubs off on you through a process of osmosis. Humans are mimetic and always will be. The faster we acknowledge how much others shape our interests, the better. To that end, the Internet can be a portal to people with particular passions — crafts, countries, people…whatever. This YouTube channel illuminates the technical beauty of Formula One racing. Start with this video about corners or this one about tire wear. For an entry point into the culture of Formula One, I recommend this Netflix documentary.

Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality: Robert Pirsig is famous for a book called Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It’s an excellent book that has almost nothing to do with motorcycles. But instead of recommending the entire book, I’ll point you to his metaphysics of quality. In the book, he tries to define quality even though it precedes any intellectual description of it. Like beauty, it exists as a perceptual experience that words cannot describe. Start with the Wikipedia article or this Philosophy Now explainer.

​Why Should You Read the Odyssey?: In "Saving the Liberal Arts," I argue that college students are too young to study the Liberal Arts. Even Plato said that people aren’t prepared to study the Liberal Arts until the age of 30. In Book VII of The Republic, he writes: “Let us take every possible care that young persons do not study philosophy too early.” In this interview, Daniel Mendelsohn explains why ancient stories like The Odyssey still have practical benefit. He says, “When your father dies, your accounting degree is not going to help you at all to process that experience. Homer will help you.” I also resonated with this comment: “The crude preoccupation with moneymaking as the only goal of a college education is giving us a citizenry that is extremely degraded, as far as I’m concerned. I think it’s only the crudest and least interesting practicality that has no time for the humanities.”

​Tim Keller's 'Questioning Christianity' Lectures: I attended these lectures live while living in New York, and they became my main entry point into Christianity. Keller's core skill is explaining Christian ideas to a skeptical and secular audience. In particular, I recommend two episodes: Identity and Morality. Historically, our identities were given to us at birth. We were defined by our birthplaces and our family names. To the modern mind, this classic relationship with identity is oppressive and limiting, because modern life is different. We want to be unconstrained. Our identities come from within. But what we end up doing is measuring our worth by our level of achievement and our latest successes. In the absence of God, we manufacture our own identities, which can cause us to conflate self-worth with social status. Keller's other lecture, on morality, sent me down a rabbit hole of the intellectual underpinnings of the founding American ideas, as codified in the Declaration of Independence. The canonical line reads: “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.” The problem is that human equality isn't self-evident at all. It only becomes self-evident when your worldview assumes the existence of a Creator who created every human in His image. Throw away God and you throw away moral absolutes.