In March 2014, the sitting president of the United States walked onto a Funny Or Die set with two potted ferns, sat across from Zach Galifianakis, and let himself be insulted on camera for six minutes.

The point was the Affordable Care Act. Healthcare.gov enrollment among young people had been lagging. The administration needed a way to reach an audience that wasn’t watching the State of the Union. So Obama did Between Two Ferns.

It worked. Traffic to healthcare.gov spiked. The video drove more young sign-ups than any other single piece of outreach that season.

But what makes it beautiful isn’t the policy outcome. It’s the deadpan. It’s the willingness to look small, to be the straight man, to let the bit land. When I first saw this it was radical to see a president be made fun of and stay in the joke. A head of state who seemed to be able to let the ego slide artlessly without losing the necessary poise.

I think about this clip a lot. About how power can be wielded with lightness. About comedy as civic infrastructure.

The grandchild of slaves, and the tenth child of sharecroppers, he won four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. The games were intended to be a showcase of Aryan superiority by the Germans who were hosting.

Jesse’s phenomenal performance, and the other German athletes who supported him in friendship, remain a testament to the beauty of inclusion and friendship in athletic performance that echo through time.

Sometimes the best among us, and our best performances, are withheld through fear or bigotry. Jesse showed the world that this is not always the case. I love the photos of his smiles during this performance.

They are truly genuine and speak to real joy.

Every time I watch it, I’m impressed again by the beauty of the message, the unity of the leaders, and their deep love and understanding of Nature.

In 2024, the leaders with whom we were friends from Savimbo said that the atrocities of WWII had led to the release and adoption of the Human Rights Code. They felt that the energy behind climate change, and the threats to Mother Earth, had opened an opportunity for a new era in human relationships to Nature.

See for yourself if their words resonate with you. I think this video is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.

Maybe this is how art is if you really participate in making it, it doesn’t feel like yours at all. I don’t know I just know this is the one piece on my list I was involved in and it feels like it just happened near me and is equally as transcendent and involving as the other ones.

Sometimes the contemplation of great injustices and inhuman behavior can spark a response from deep in the soul of intense beauty — a shout into the void.

We see this from other people on our list. Charles Dabrowski, Viktor Frankl, Chief Joseph. Some of the world’s greatest art has originated from oppressed peoples in response to that oppression.

As Joy DeGruy explains in her work on Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome, multigenerational trauma is the lived history of many Black people the world over.

This song, if you really listen to it, is the opposite of that pain. “I need something, give me something wonderful,” sings Michael, and the many voices that people this performance. Pay particular attention to the unobtrusive soloist who emerges at the end.

Sometimes we see only wounds. Please lend an ear instead to the sound of healing.

We are all at the mercy of childhood conditioning and subconscious wiring in so much of our lives. It also takes tremendous strength to absorb traumas and not perpetuate them. To give better than we get.

Who do we want to be in this chain?

I really adore this art piece. The performance troupe doesn’t have a lot of work online, but honestly, just this one video is enough. I must have watched it hundreds of times.

But I didn’t really appreciate his show until I heard long-time contributor Starlee Kine interview Phil Collins on the Break-Up episode shortly after a tough divorce

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Over the years, I’ve listened to this episode again and again, and each time I’m in a different place. Each time I hear something different. Creativity, heartbreak, renewal, and always… compassion.

I think this might be the most authentic and healing radio piece I’ve ever listened to, and I’ll probably be a fan of radio until I die and they hold my funeral in VR :)

If your heart is broken, try giving it to Ira and Starlee for a bit. I promise you they will make it better.

Break-Up — This American Life

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/339/break-up

I think something about the originality of the song, the way it rewrites itself each verse, the compassion, and the awe she expresses toward life sticks with me.

Regina seems to sing this gladness with a round, and stable voice. This one is for all my friends who sense the exquisite pain of the beauty and bitterness of the wheel of time.

As we face global environmental crisis, increasingly global economic and health systems, the need to reevaluate the US justice system, and politicized strife in many countries, we can all benefit from how an island nation solves its problems. What do you do when you don’t have space for a feud? What do you do when there is nowhere to run, and you don’t want to fight?

Hawaiians worked this out 5,000 years ago and we can learn from them.

Hoʻoponopono is defined in the Hawaiian Dictionary as:

(a) “To put to rights; to put in order or shape, correct, revise, adjust, amend, regulate, arrange, rectify, tidy up, make orderly or neat, administer, superintend, supervise, manage, edit, work carefully or neatly; to make ready, as canoemen preparing to catch a wave.”

(b) “Mental cleansing: family conferences in which relationships were set right (hoʻoponopono) through prayer, discussion, confession, repentance, and mutual restitution and forgiveness.”

Perhaps most telling is where the process starts. Instead of “conflict” or “dispute,” Hawaiians see the problem as “stubborn dispute,” “having difference,” or “entanglement.”

Can this mantra help us find resolution?

I find her work deeply soothing. I also want to give a shout-out to all the adult caregivers out there. Susan is someone who really gets it.

Nez Percé traditional lands covered northeastern Oregon, southeastern Washington, and central Idaho, but any perusal of history will show Chief Joseph was a great leader, facing a terrible future for his people with dignity, candor, and courage. Anyone living on these traditional lands needs to read his words, as they speak of a custodianship that must be honored.

I am tired of talk that comes to nothing. It makes my heart sick when I remember all the good words and all the broken promises. There has been too much talking by men who had no right to talk. Too many misinterpretations have been made; too many misunderstandings have come up between the white men and the Indians.

If the white man wants to live in peace with the Indian he can live in peace. There need be no trouble. Treat all men alike. Give them the same laws. Give them all an even chance to live and grow. All men were made by the same Great Spirit Chief. They are all brothers. The earth is the mother of all people, and all people should have equal rights upon it.

— Chief Joseph, 1879, Washington DC

No speech from Chief Joseph as a leader can be free of grief, gravitas, and historical unfairness. But his words stand as a testament that no one’s circumstances define their bearing and ability to express themselves.

There is a reason people sang this song at this time. I think it might make more sense to people who live in Northern latitudes who understand the cyclical nature of deep winter and early spring.

I liked this article about the phenomenon. Here’s an EDM Remix of the Viral “Wellerman” TikTok Sea Shanty — And It’s Actually a Banger. There was something about the call to hope that resonated in its leadership, and the echoing response.

We ought not forget our species’ strengths when we fight to overcome its weaknesses.

@thats.mindblowing#duet with @_luke.the.voice_ #bass #xyzbca #xyzcba #stitch #foru #foryou #fyp #banger #seashanty @nthnevnss

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Tom Hopper & Emmy Raver-Lampman are Dancing in the Moonlight in episode 6 of The Umbrella Academy. They don’t seem like professional dancers, but that makes the precision and delight of this dance even more beautiful.

I can’t get over what a perfect job they did in expressing the wonder, light, awkwardness, and joy of love.

It remains one of the most startling and inclusive experiences of my life.

This was perhaps the most gruffly adorable inclusion message I ever saw in my life. The ’you can play’ campaign was all the more authentic for being so direct.

The phrase came from a piece Patrick Burke wrote on Outsports after his brother Brendan Burke (who came out publicly in 2009 and was killed in a car accident in February 2010) — "If you can play, you can play." Patrick co-founded the You Can Play Project in March 2012 with Brian Kitts and Glenn Witman in tribute to Brendan.

The phrase came from a piece Patrick Burke wrote on Outsports after his brother Brendan Burke (who came out publicly in 2009 and was killed in a car accident in February 2010) — "If you can play, you can play." Patrick co-founded the You Can Play Project in March 2012 with Brian Kitts and Glenn Witman in tribute to Brendan.

I don’t know why this video still hits me so hard, but it’s just the best piece of work on meritocracy I think I’ve ever seen. Still use this mantra in our work to this day.

“Werfel, a 6-year old Austrian orphan, beams with unbounded joy as he clasps a new pair of shoes presented to him by the American Red Cross.” — LIFE magazine, original caption December 30, 1946

Something about this image is so strikingly lovely. I think it’s been overused a lot as a guilt-bludgeon (starving orphans in [insert-country here]).

But for me, the image holds this transcendent gratitude. It’s something needed… and found. This child is so honest in how he savors that moment.

Does the need or its method of resolution really matter? This embrace, and its loveliness, is something we all have access to the next time we find our car keys.

Christmas topics often revolve around injustice and lack, but they could just as easily be about finding what we have when it arrives.

Shout out to his recent work as well on Kidding, which is a more adult version of the same deconstructions.

It sometimes reminds me of the involuntary nature of a dog’s tail wag. The way his feet escape him.

It seems to me that sometimes people who struggle with depression understand happiness more fully than others.

Many people know I’m a climber and have been for many years. I don’t recommend free-soloing, but I do recommend this movie, and I’m okay with that discrepancy.

I think a lot of people have gotten caught up in the execution of this feat, but what I find truly beautiful is that it is an expression for something else, something beyond fear that Alex seems to have found.

I always think of this poem as a series of life tasks. Can base inclinations be transmuted to higher-order actions? What kind of energy does that take? Can it

become a habit?

This poem is gendered, English, many -isms — but think of when you have seen the crucible activities in it enacted in your own life and in the people you have known closely.

Like the classic series of yoga poses ritualized in Bikram yoga, or the barre techniques that comprise the core of ballet, perhaps there is a core of universal human strengths that can be developed to enhance the expression of our individual lives.

Read and enjoy.

Bear with me here, it’s worth appreciating.

Charles (Kazimierz) Dabrowski is often referred to as one of the founding fathers of positive psychology. In short, he researched giftedness before anyone cared. But he did so in an unusual context. A Polish citizen, he survived WW1 and WW2 as a psychiatrist in charge of a sanitarium.

A gifted scientist, he used his scientific credentials to support some 200 gifted students under his care at a “secret institute” disguised as an Institute for Tuberculosis. From 1942 to 1945 the institute sheltered and saved many war orphans, priests, Polish soldiers, members of the resistance, and Jewish children. Dabrowski was one of 38/400 polish psychiatrists to survive the war and this exposure shaped his theories. As he stated: “The juxtaposition of inhuman forces and inhuman humans with those who were sensitive, capable of sacrifice, courageous, gave a vivid panorama of a scale of values from the lowest to the highest.”

Dabrowski argued that neurodiversity held value to humanity, that falling apart was not always falling down, and he did so in and out of Stalinist and Nazi prisons.

The theory of positive disintegration is simple: some breakdowns are breakthroughs. Dabrowski believed that humans evolved by falling apart. Like the mythical phoenix. Read the theory, and appreciate the life that created it.

It’s truly beautiful.

But more deeply, beauty and the emotions it evokes can be seen as many colors with different intensity and hue, covering the gamut of human experience. The experience of shared beauty comes from all aspects of consciousness — history, art, literature, music, science, from many voices and from all cultures.

Please let this song soften you into the experience I am hoping to share with you. Many voices, joined in one purpose.

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I encounter so many stunning experiences in my travels and rarely attempt to share them. Then I offhandedly shared a poem with someone I met at work, and when I revisited it, I saw again what a work of staggering genius and beauty it was.

Even more interestingly, so did my new friend, who came from a life, social circle, and job role very ostensibly different from my own. I began to wonder if beauty was universal.

In Western life, beauty is so often co-opted as a marketing vector. We become inured to the idea that someone is trying to sell us something when they make works of art. We become cynical that our perception of beauty would ever be shared.

So I’m going to try something new. I’m going to share 200 beautiful things and see what happens. I’m really just curious.

Perceptions of beauty change the people who have them. Curating beauty implies a responsibility to properly represent neurodiversity. And the focus on beauty can lead us to create more intentionally, and with greater effect.

I did my best with this list to share sources of beauty that I’ve returned to many times over the years for solace. This is a private list of experiences, works of art, and profoundly moving things I’ve seen that reliably kept me going in the darkest nights of my life and seemed to retain their resonance every time I returned.

This list is an out-breath of genius. And a curious question into the world: what does beauty do?

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