The Principal Uncertainty

Send us Fan Mail Ryan Eggensperger is a playwright, DJ, actor, and tour guide from Helena, Montana who has spent twenty years figuring out how to sit with a blank page without resenting it. He calls it carrying the zero — and it's a practice, not a concept: he does it every morning, and what surprised me most isn't that he does it but that he doesn't resent it. We met when he was di...

Send us Fan Mail Jessie Rack is an ecologist, naturalist, and environmental educator passionate about communicating how the world works. Jessie has a PhD in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology from the University of Connecticut (for which she studied salamanders!) and diverse experiences in both formal and informal education. She taught writing at Princeton University, wrote for the NPR ScienceDesk...

Send us Fan Mail Gwyneth Hagan grew up moving. Air Force family — eight, nine, ten different schools, no one place long enough to put down roots. What she could count on was this: finding some small natural space wherever she landed, some patch of grass or stand of trees, and letting that be enough. Later, she dropped out of college, drove across the country, and spent a year on an organic farm in...

Send us Fan Mail Steve Filosa spent twenty years running Prep@Pingree, a scholarship, academic enrichment, and jobs program in Essex, Massachusetts. The program's premise was simple and counter-cultural: serve kids through long-term relational commitment rather than high-altitude, short-term intervention. Not something that scales. Something that works. By design, Steve built it to replace hi...

Send us Fan Mail Bio: Michael Rohd has spent thirty-five years asking the same question from increasingly systemic angles: what does it take for people who don't usually talk to each other to actually talk, and what happens when they do? He started in 1991, running theater workshops on the secret fifth floor of a Washington DC homeless shelter — a hidden HIV clinic where people sought care an...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Salmaan Kamal is an internal medicine physician and addiction specialist at the VA Medical Center in West Los Angeles, where he cares for veterans experiencing homelessness. At every major crossroads — leaving Alabama for Princeton, returning home for medical school, turning down an Ivy League fellowship — he chose proximity to need and to family over prestige. In this convers...

Send us Fan Mail Alison Dilworth is a Philadelphia-based artist, muralist, and shrine-maker whose work spans the profoundly private and the intensely public. She is also someone who has spent her adult life thinking about what it costs to hold things — grief, love, other people's stories, a kid running toward traffic — and what it means to be genuinely present to any of it. We talk about what...

Send us Fan Mail Adam Ekberg is a photographer whose work lives in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the George Eastman Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and the Worcester Art Museum. His solo exhibition Minor Spectacles ran at the George Eastman Museum in 2023. Adam and I met years ago when our kids were in forest school together in rural New Jersey — one...

Send us Fan Mail Kanwal Matharu is a cornea surgeon, Fulbright scholar, and global health educator who has spent his career building pipelines between American academic medicine and under-resourced communities around the world. He's also my friend—we met when he was a freshman at Princeton and I was working in residential life, and I've watched him navigate the distance between idealism...

Send us Fan Mail What do you do when the people you're caring for can't give you certainty that you're doing it right? Lynn Casteel Harper—minister, chaplain, and author of On Vanishing: Mortality, Dementia, and What It Means to Disappear —spent years with people living with dementia. Not trying to fix them or bring them back, but learning to read a different kind of language: silen...