Great to hear from you again Vlad, and as always thanks for another great comment. Yes! Michelle is my better half (by far), and we work together on all this. She’s who you can hear on the Friday talks we release.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on beauty, and there is absolutely a relationship between “mystery” and “beauty”: if we entirely know something, it will struggle to be beautiful to us, which is why I really like what Walker Percy says about beauty needing to transcend “preset complexes.”

There is something about how the collective saying “x is beautiful” can drive us to think about x, which we might not find beautiful at first, but we might keep returning to it precisely because of the social element. This can help us push into something and make it a “mystery” that otherwise wouldn’t be one to us, but at the same time the collective acknowledgement can be a threat to the beauty of something, precisely because the collective can take away the mystery and add “preset complexes.” It’s strange.

Anyway, I hope the week ahead is good to you!