Start Here: Follow Your Curiosity

Sunlit cabinet of curiosities with books, a globe, telescope, record, and rainbow prism beside an open door.

A good idea can change the way you see an ordinary day. A song can give you words for something you have carried for years. A story from history can make today’s headlines look different. A question about a new technology can send you back to an old question about being human.

Welcome to Bright, Shiny Objects! I’m Todd Lohenry, and this is where I collect those moments—and follow them a little further.

You’ll find thoughtful reading on the mind, technology, history, music, relationships, and the art of living. If you’re new here, choose a doorway below. You don’t need to catch up. Start with something that matters to you.

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Listening Is the First Act of Love

Illustration of an older couple talking over coffee at a sunny kitchen table, one listening closely, with a wall calendar of check marks and a few X’s behind them

Most of us know someone who gives great advice and has a messy life. Sometimes that someone is us.

So I smiled when I came across a talk by Harville Hendrix, the couples therapist best known for the bestseller Getting the Love You Want, which he wrote with his wife and collaborator, Helen LaKelly Hunt. In “The couples therapists who nearly got divorced,” presented at TED2026 in April 2026, Hendrix admits that while millions of couples were using their method, their own marriage was coming apart.

The talk left me with a simple question: if the experts couldn’t talk their way out of a bad pattern, what finally worked?

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The Battle of Brooklyn, All in One Place

Painting of Continental soldiers boarding rowboats on the foggy East River at night, lanterns glowing, as Washington’s army escapes Brooklyn in August 1776

Some battles you read about. This one I followed.

For the 250th anniversary, I wrote about the Battle of Brooklyn almost day by day. Then, in October, I went and walked it.

Call it the Battle of Brooklyn. Call it the Battle of Long Island. Same fight. Same August 27, 1776. Same moment when the American Revolution very nearly ended before it really began.

Here is everything I’ve written about it, in one place, in the order it happened.

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The Prison Ship Martyrs

You climb the steps in Fort Greene Park, and there it is.

A granite column, 149 feet tall, with a bronze urn on top.

It looks like a monument to a victory.

It isn’t.

Underneath it, in a crypt, lie the remains of some of the thousands of Americans who died as prisoners of war in the harbor below. Not on a battlefield. Not in a charge. Crammed below deck on rotting British ships.

Standing there, it’s hard to take in.

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Making Peace With New York

Split illustration of Brooklyn streets and Manhattan skyline across the river

In 1983, I ate a lot of tuna salad.

Mac and cheese, too. That’s what a 25-year-old at the bottom of the pay scale could afford in New York City.

Last week I went back to her. This visit, I had lobster mac and cheese at Fraunces Tavern.

Washington said farewell to his officers in that building in 1783. Two hundred years later, I was a couple of blocks away at 60 Broad, eating tuna salad and feeling sorry for myself.

Somewhere between those two meals is a story about a city, a younger version of me, and what it means to come to peace with a place that never knew she hurt you.

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Anxious Optimism: Ethan Mollick on Learning to Live With AI

An older craftsman weaving at a wooden hand loom while a glowing robotic hand helps guide a thread

Lately the AI headlines come in pairs. One story says the machines are getting frightening. The next one says they just booked somebody a dinner reservation. Most mornings I can’t decide whether to feel nervous or impressed, so I end up feeling a little of both.

That whiplash is exactly where Adam Clark Estes begins his Vox interview, Humans can coexist with AI. Here’s how. Published on October 28, 2026, it has Estes talking with Ethan Mollick — associate professor at the Wharton School, faculty director of its Generative AI Labs, and the writer behind the newsletter One Useful Thing — about his new book, Co-Existence: The Next Phase of AI.

The question it left me with is easy to ask and hard to answer: when a machine can do more and more of the work, how do I decide what to hand over and what to keep?

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Beyond the Bridge: Patrick Stewart’s Other Great Roles

An empty theater stage with red velvet curtains and a single spotlight on a wooden chair, opening onto a starfield of deep space

When someone we admire dies, most of us do the same thing. We go back to the one role, the one song, the one moment we know best, and we stay there a while.

I did exactly that a few days ago when I wrote about losing my captain. It was Picard, start to finish.

Then I found Ross Johnson’s piece, “10 of the Most Iconic Patrick Stewart Roles Beyond Captain Picard,” published in Lifehacker on October 30, 2026. It left me with a question I hadn’t thought to ask: how much of the man did I actually know?

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The Dongan Oak

The Dongan Oak Monument at Battle Pass in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, marking where the boundary oak was felled during the Battle of Long Island

I almost missed it.

A small stone marker along a path in Prospect Park, tucked among the trees. It’s a little hard to see.

But I found it. And I stood there.

And I felt like I was in the presence of greatness.

Not because of the stone. Because of what happened right there, on that spot, in 1776.

I also got something I didn’t expect: a sense of the topography of the Battle of Long Island.

The rise of the hills. The gap in the ridge. How the ground itself decided where men would stand and where they would fall.

Maps flatten things. Standing there doesn’t.

Here’s the story.

It started as a line on a map.

In 1685, the colonial governor of New York, Thomas Dongan, granted a charter that sorted out who owned what in the farm country of Kings County. Lines had to be drawn somewhere. One of them ran through a tall oak in the hills between the Town of Brooklyn and the Town of Flatbush.

The tree became the boundary. People started calling it the Dongan Oak.

For ninety-one years, it just stood there and was a line.

Then came August 27, 1776.

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