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The ideas we leave behind tell us as much about who we are as the ideas themselves. They reveal our fears. They mark the edges of our ambition. They show us what we thought we wanted before we discovered what we actually wanted. They’re a map of the roads not taken.

People often ask me, did you go to ad school? Yes, I did. Her name is Janet Champ. https://strangealchemy1.substack.com/p/janet-champ-beat-me-out-at-the-kelly

I woke up this morning to that familiar Rhode Island quiet. The kind that usually feels like a gift. The sense that, for all our flaws, we live in a place that still knows how to exhale.

And then there it was again.

The news from yesterday, sitting heavy in all of us. Violence, this time brushing up against Brown. A place that, for many of us, has always stood in for thought, curiosity, youth, and possibility.

I’m not an alum. I don’t walk those quads every day. But if you live here long enough, Brown doesn’t feel like a university. It feels like our university.

It’s the hill you drive past without thinking. The bookstore you wander into. The students you overhear at coffee shops, arguing about ideas with the reckless hope only the young can afford. When something breaks here, it breaks a little everywhere.

What struck me most wasn’t the shock of it. I think we lost the right to that a long time ago. More like grief mixed with a kind of exhausted recognition. That awful, sinking sense. Even here? Even us?

Rhode Island is small. We measure distance in minutes, not miles. Tragedy doesn’t stay contained. It ripples. It shows up in group texts, in lowered voices, in the way you hold your kids a second longer before they head out the door.

I keep thinking about the students. The parents. The people who woke up yesterday expecting a normal day of classes, errands, routines and instead had the floor drop out beneath them. There’s a particular cruelty in violence that interrupts learning, that invades spaces meant for becoming.

I don’t have a solution to offer here. Just a statement of feeling. Sadness. Anger. Weariness. And love for this strange, tight little state, for its institutions, for the people who call it home. If there’s anything Rhode Islanders know how to do, it’s look out for one another when the circle tightens.

Today, the quiet feels different. Less like calm. More like a pause. And maybe that pause is asking us to remember what we owe one another. Especially when the unthinkable shows up at our doorstep.

Some creative teams can seemingly do no wrong while others somehow find themselves more and more divided. Last week, I asked around. How does it happen? What corrosive forces can burrow their way into a partnership so deeply, they eventually cause teams to turn against each other. Here’s what they said:
https://strangealchemy1.substack.com/p/dumb-ways-creative-partners-kill

Who are we to talk about a brand's authentic truth when we aren't willing to share our own?

https://strangealchemy1.substack.com/p/can-ideas-survive-in-a-society-of

#creativity #creativetruth #authenticity #authentictruth #wartsandall

We all have our creative heroes. Mine is Jake LaMotta.

https://strangealchemy1.substack.com/p/if-you-cant-take-a-punch-dont-even

#creativeresiliency #jakelamotta #ragingbull

Ice boating on Jupiter.

He never won a Lion. He never delivered the keynote at the Lumiere. And yet, he was happy.

https://strangealchemy1.substack.com/p/my-father-worked-in-a-factory-he-2a5