TL;DR is a monthly digest summarizing the vital bits from the previous month's How to Live newsletter so you don't miss a thing.

Here’s everything from June—the free essays you might have missed and what paid subscribers got behind the paywall.

Sophie Calle is a French conceptual artist who uses constraints to make art. Many of the restrictions are voyeuristic, or surveillant. For instance, when she returned to France after a period away, to reacquaint herself with Paris she decided to follow strangers. For a different project, she followed another subject for 13 days while secretly recording all his activities.

Viewed through today’s lens, this is stalking. Viewed through a purely artistic one, it’s —among other things — a meditation on loneliness, bearing witness and uncertainty.

Her work focuses on absence, desire, interpretation, private detection and public exposure.

One of the reasons I love this piece is the focus on interpretation. The contrasts between how we see ourselves and how others see us. There are versions of us living in the world we'll never know about. Memories people have of us we'll never hear. Photographs of us we'll never see.

I'm fascinated by the variety of ways there are to make something. The fact that we all render the same experience slightly differently feels like the paradox of being alive. And the experience of living with so much possibility, so many interpretations, so many varied opinions is the most reliable part of living.

So much of being in friendship with other women is about dissecting, analyzing, parsing the nuances of other peoples’s actions, behaviors and intentions. Often we get side-tracked by the impact of the topic and neglect the deeper investigation.

Take Care of Yourself is a project about a break-up letter Sophie Calle received. The letter ended with the words, “Take care of yourself,” and she decided to do just that, sending it to 107 women in various fields and asking them to interpret it through the lens of their specific expertise. From Crossword Puzzle Writer to Criminologist.

The project was shown at the 2007 Venice Biennale, with visitors walking slowly from piece to piece, reading the interpretations, watching videos of women reading the letter aloud, hearing it performed as an opera, as slam poetry.

We live in an age where we confuse opinion with fact. Every social media take is “right.” We reward certainty, which doesn’t teach us how to live with the daily uncertainty of life. The most interesting questions don’t have just one answer.

The project revealed what we already know, but keep forgetting: the text of a life is not definitive. There is no single story. Nothing is as rigid and inflexible as it feels.

What if you could see your own life through 107 different perspectives?

This is what the show, later turned into a book, asks.

On my bedside table sits a handwritten reminder: The brain takes the shape of what the mind rests upon.

This principle, rooted in Buddhism, is also the foundation of neuroplasticity: our thoughts alter the physical structure of the brain.

Say what?

Yup.

What you think and do repeatedly can literally influence the physical structure of the brain. The brain you're born with continues changing throughout your life.

When you learn something new, neurons (brain cells) form new connections. In some brain regions, your brain may even create new neurons through a process called neurogenesis.

Remember Newton's third law of motion? For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction?

Your brain operates on a zero-sum budget. When you get obsessed with piano, it doesn't just build new networks for finger coordination and musical processing—it starts pulling resources from the motor skills you're neglecting. Those pathways get weaker while the piano ones get stronger.

Neuroplasticity is your brain's constant rewiring project. It's always forming new connections and adapting to whatever you're doing most: learning, practicing, even recovering from injury. But it aso adapts and strengthens connection to your most recycled thoughts.

The mechanics: Neurons communicate through synapses, and repeated activity strengthens these connections. Scientists call this Hebbian plasticity: "neurons that fire together, wire together." Every time you practice something, you're literally reinforcing those neural networks.

But there's a catch—brains are efficient, not ambitious. They follow established pathways and shut down the unused ones. Left to their own devices, they'll take the path of least resistance every time.

The upside? We can direct this process through our choices. What we practice and choose to believe is what gets consistently reinforced.

Once we understand how these systems work, we can deliberately guide them to reinforce habits, gradually shift thought patterns, and influence aspects of our behavior and identity over time.

For instance, I've been consistently practicing good sleep hygiene by telling myself I'm an excellent sleeper. And surprisingly? It seems to be working.

Below, I share a handful of principles from neuroscience that can help us work with our brain's natural adaptability, and influence who we become.

Friday Drops are for paid subscribers, and they feature something that caught my eye that I wanted to share.

A century before pharmaceutical companies ran television ads featuring people in high-energy fits of synchronized dancing, followed by the 2x recitation of (sometimes fatal) side-effects, there were patent medicine cards.

These small, colorful cards were designed to be collected, displayed, and passed around. Think baseball cards, but for questionable medical remedies, and marketed to women. Shopkeepers handed them out. Some were tucked into packages. Others were distributed on the street.

Most featured beautiful illustrations, catchy slogans, over-the-top testimonials, and patently (sorry) false claims about what the medicine inside could do for you. They were among the earliest forms of mass advertising for medical products in the United States.

The cards below come from UCLA's collection of patent medicine cards (ironic, since the medicines themselves weren't legally patented).

Many of the products weren't just ineffective; some were dangerous. Yet they were enormously popular, and it was this popularity that eventually helped spur the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, which laid the foundation for what would become the FDA.

Which didn't actually solve the problem of promoting medicine as a cure, but we can't have what's best for people now, can we?

Here are a few of my favorites.

📌 This essay is for paid subscribers.

You’re at a party with a date—someone you really like. You know a lot of people at this party, yet somehow you and your date get stuck talking to someone you find insufferable. Each time you see them, they’re too drunk, too handsy, too close, their spittle sprays in your face through those big, red, wet popsicle lips.

They’ve been interrupting your new person’s sentences, clipping them off well below the node. Guessing before listening.

“So he decided to name the kid—”

“Bob!” interrupts the interrupter.

“No—after his mother.”

You’re mortified, wishing you could fast forward the night. Get to the post mortem performance review. Bond over the shared creeps you got from Wet Lips Spittle Mouth.

In the elevator, you profusely apologize about getting stuck with that absolute horror human, when—much to your deepest horror, your date says:

“Oh, he wasn’t so bad.”

This, naturally, stops you in your tracks.

“There is no worst guy. He’s it. He wins!”

“I thought he was sort of endearing.”

Now, you can either appreciate this aspect of your possible mate, or you can get defensive because HOW ON EARTH CAN YOU LOVE SOMEONE WHO ISN’T ANNOYED BY THE SAME SORT OF ANNOYING?

They’re wrong. You’re right.

The guy is gross and you’re absolutely correct.

Your taste in people is impeccable—in fact, having good taste in people is one of your finest qualities.

The guy was a garbage monster.

Your new person is wrong, and you are now consumed with the fact that your partner doesn’t know that they’re wrong, and therefore you must now spend the rest of the night proving to your new person how wrong they are in order for them to be on the same page as you, living the same reality.

Because, like you just said: You are right.

Except…You might be wrong.

This moment of feeling objectively right about something subjective is called Naïve Realism, and we all, to one degree or another, suffer from it. Naïve realism is our innate ability to feel that how we see the world, and what we believe about it, is objective and correct. This phenomenon is what finds people stating their opinions as facts. That what we feel is true is, in fact, true for everyone.

Or, should be.

On December 19, 1974, the writer Linda Rosenkrantz tape-recorded her friend, the photographer Peter Hujar, telling her everything he'd done the day before. The transcript sat unpublished for almost fifty years until Rosenkrantz rediscovered it in her eighties; it came out in 2021 as Peter Hujar’s Day, and Ira Sachs later made a film from it.

I wanted to try the same exercise. To track a day in full, see where the time actually goes.

This is Tuesday, June 23rd, 2026

What do people do all day?

At 7am the alarm goes off and I hit snooze. I've had a bad night of sleep and I need more time. I keep hitting snooze until I finally look at the clock—it's 9am. I've missed off-leash hours at the dog park. Busy is asleep beside me. I try to remember what I have to do today before I look at my phone.

I can’t remember. I look at my phone.

The first thing I see is this:

My sister just finished reading Whistler by Ann Patchett and loved it so much, she said me I had to read it, especially because of the sisters subplot. I’d just started it the day before, so this feels a bit spooky. But in a good way.

I send my sister a screenshot.

I get up. Drink some water. Put on Pod Save America which I don’t typically listen to, but I want to hear about the reflecting pool drama.

I listen while I brush my teeth, wash my face, put on sunblock. Back in my bedroom, I scour my floor and bench at the foot of my bed for clothes to wear. I check the weather. It’s 66 degrees. I put on pants and a t-shirt, and make a mental note to clean my bedroom.

I put Busy in her harness, which I call her “bra,” and grab a light jacket.

We head to Bittersweet for my iced Americano and her morning treat.

Rosa and Gemma are there (Gemma and her husband Lucien own the shop. Rosa is their daughter and works there.) They are part of my extended neighborhood family.

They come outside and hang with Busy, while I drink my coffee, and she eats her treat.

Busy and I start towards the park, but it begins to drizzle, and Busy stops, quickly rerouting us back home.

At home, I dry her off, give her breakfast. She sniffs it and determines it’s beneath her standards. She walks out of “the restaurant” without touching her food or paying.

Until next week, I will remain,