Hello coffee lovers! ☕
This month, I've been thinking a lot about silence. Not the uncomfortable kind, the intentional kind.
Pythagoras nailed it:
"A fool is known by speech, and a wise man by silence."
Lately, I've been in so many meetings where everyone wanted to be heard, the talking never stopped, and the actual point got lost. As an HSP (Highly Sensitive Person), being the listener in those rooms is exhausting. I'm absorbing every single word, using all my energy just to filter the noise, breathe, and finally deliver the one insight that actually matters.
Everyone wants to feel heard. I get it. But the person who waits, listens, and speaks with precision will always be more compelling than the one filling every silence. Less is always more.
On the business front, multiple deals are in motion, and honestly? I have no idea how they'll unfold.
Living with that uncertainty is tough, but it's exactly what I signed up for when I went independent a year and a half ago. Somehow, I just know it's going to be great.
When it gets heavy, I have a ritual: I get on my bike, ride to the sea, and sit with a book. Watching the water breathe in and out, completely unbothered by my pipeline, is exactly what keeps me sane.
So, coffee in hand, water in mind, here we go.
Here's what's brewing on this month's menu:
- Tech - When the billionaires run: an apocalypse tracker for the rest of us ✈️
- Science & Art - The Milky Way, photographed 🌌
- Innovation - The 15-year-old who built a robotic turtle 🐢
- Culture - Islam - What happens when you read the other side 📖
- Word Bites - Shouganai 🗣️
- May in History 🌍
- Recommendations - TV show, a movie, two books 🌟
When the Rich Run ✈️
Someone built an apocalypse detector.... Say what?!
An LA-based artist named Kyle McDonald is tracking 11,000 private jets in real time. Not to shame anyone, just to spot trouble before the rest of us do.
The logic:
- When something terrible is about to happen, the people with private jets will know first
- They'll leave. Fast.
- The spike in the data will be the signal
He called it the Apocalypse Early Warning System. It compares live departures against historical baselines and rates the threat level from 1 to 5. Five means: probably flee. You can sign up for alerts by text or email.
It hasn't gone above 4.
The idea came to him in April this year, as worldwide tensions escalated and he noticed a spike in private jet activity. "Was it because Trump was threatening genocide without even getting the approval of the Congress?" he asked, in an interview with the Washington Post. So, he built the tracker to find out (interesting dude).
Is it reliable? I'm not that sure... For example, a big sports event looks identical from above. The Super Bowl, in this case, looks a lot like the end of the world.
But the logic underneath it stays.
We've reached a place where people genuinely believe the wealthy will exit first.
"I want people to laugh," McDonald told the Washington Post. "And remember, we're not completely beaten down or out of hope."
Partly satire. Partly data. Mostly a very honest picture of where we are.
WDYT about this? Comment below (that's also how you'll know I added comments down there).
The Milky Way, Photographed 🌌
I've always been obsessed with space.
Both ways, actually. The science blows my mind, the scale of it, the physics, the sheer improbability that any of this works at all. And then there's the other way: the quietly overwhelming kind, where you look at a photo of a galaxy and something in your chest tightens, because you're trying to hold something your brain simply can't.
The universe is so endlessly big. And we are here. On this tiny planet. With our coffee, our wine, our open deals, our worries, and our private jet trackers.
And above us, every night, is that.
This year, the photography blog Capture the Atlas received over 6,500 submissions for their annual Milky Way Photographer of the Year, a record, from 15 nationalities across 12 countries. 25 images were chosen.
Some of them just made me stop for a good ten minutes... and stare.
People traveled to places with no electricity, no light, no signal, some shots taking five nights, just for a photo of a galaxy. As the editor of Capture the Atlas put it: "Every image in this collection began the same way. Someone looked up."
We forget, in cities, that the sky exists. The light we make swallows the light that's been traveling toward us for millions of years.
See all 25 images at Capture the Atlas. Clear your schedule first. 😉
What did you love most?! Remember there are comments? Haha.
The Kid Who Built a Turtle 🐢
Coral reefs are dying.
We know this. Scientists know this. The data is there. What's been missing is a way to monitor underwater ecosystems in real time, without disturbing them in the process.
Enter Evan.
Evan Budz, 15, from Burlington, Ontario, was on a camping trip when he spotted a snapping turtle in the water. Very quiet, and completely non-disruptive to everything around it.
He went home and built one.
Yes, yes... last year, he built a bionic turtle (watch the video below).
BURT, the Bionic Underwater Robotic Turtle, mimics the swimming movement of a green sea turtle and uses AI to detect threats like coral bleaching and invasive species. It detects coral bleaching with 96% accuracy.
96% accuracy!!
He tested it in his grandparents' backyard pool.
Then he won first place at the European Union Contest for Young Scientists, competing against students from 40 countries.
He's in grade 10.
His parents raised him with one simple rule: every place you visit, leave it a bit better than you found it.
He took that literally.
Next up, he wants BURT to detect microplastics. Of course he does.
So what did you build recently?! Haha.
What Happens When You Read the Other Side 📖
I grew up in Kazakhstan, until I was ten.
I come from a Jewish family, so I knew a handful of our own prayers. But I trained alongside Muslim girls at the artistic-gymnastics school, and the call of the muezzin used to drift in through the window of the building where I learned piano. Faith, for me, was always plural, layered, in the background.
We were never a religious family. Even in Kazakhstan, where there was a Jewish community and a synagogue, we kept things loose. It was only when we made aliyah to Israel that I really started absorbing it all, the holidays, the traditions, the values. Everything.
And making aliyah meant learning a whole country, too. This complicated, beautiful place and everyone in it: Arabs, Christian Arabs, Bedouins, and more.
As I grew, my own Jewish identity grew with me, bigger and bigger, until I didn't really want to hear about anything else. It was only later, after traveling through Southeast Asia again and again all through my twenties and into my thirties, that I found Buddhism. I fell in love with it. And I was struck by how much of it rhymed with Judaism, the values, and so much more.
At some point, I started thinking: how do you really understand people, their choices, their loyalties, their fears, if you've never sat with what they believe?
Honestly, I've wondered about this for a long time. We live here as a tiny dot in an enormous Middle East, and the story we're handed is that "everyone" out there wants us gone. But so much of that is a headline. Media noise. And yes, there's real evil in the world, I'm not naive about that. Still, I kept circling the same quiet question: underneath all of it, what do they actually believe? What are the basic things? Not the media's version, not the headlines, but something deeper, the way I'd gone deep with Buddhism.
So I recently picked up Discover Islam: Answers to Frequently Asked Questions. A short, clear book. Not a political text. Not a debate. Just: here's what we believe, and why.
And what I loved was how some of it felt familiar.
The Five Pillars of Islam, the core obligations every Muslim lives by, map onto something you'd recognize from almost every major religion:
- Shahada, declaration of faith. One God. One guiding truth.
- Salat, five daily prayers. Structured time to stop and remember what matters.
- Zakat, obligatory annual charity. A percentage of what you have, given to those who don't.
- Sawm, fasting. Restraint as spiritual practice.
- Hajj, pilgrimage. A physical journey toward something larger than yourself.
Judaism has daily prayer, Shabbat, tzedakah, Yom Kippur fasting, aliyah l'regel. Christianity has confession, tithing, Lent, communion. The containers are different. The instincts underneath them are almost identical.
And then there's the passage I kept coming back to: if you intend a good deed but don't manage it, it still counts. Do it, and it multiplies. Intend harm but hold back, and that restraint counts too. Not a foreign idea. A very human one.
Most religions, at their core, aren't that different. The radical versions are. The core is the same: decency, accountability, gratitude, caring for others.
Reading outside your world doesn't mean agreeing with everything. It just means you stop being afraid of what you don't know. That's always worth something.
Word Bites! 📚✨
Shouganai (しょうがない, Japanese)
Pronounced sho-ga-nai.
A quiet acceptance of things beyond your control. Roughly: "It can't be helped." The Japanese cousin of "it is what it is", or of the French c'est la vie.
But softer than that. Less resigned. More grounded in a Buddhist understanding that some things simply are, and fighting them wastes the energy you need for what actually can change.
There's a grace in the word that the English equivalent doesn't quite carry.
I've been using it silently, to myself, a lot this month. Accepting what I can't control is one of the hardest things I work on, but after years with Buddhism, it's one I feel deeply connected to.
May in History 🌍
- May 25, 1977 - Star Wars opens 🎬 A space opera nobody expected to work premieres in a handful of theaters. It becomes a global phenomenon, reshapes Hollywood, and never really leaves.
- May 8, 1945 - VE Day 🕊️ Germany surrenders and six years of war in Europe end. Crowds flood London, Paris, and New York. Churchill announces it, then loses the election three months later in a landslide.
- May 14, 1948 - The State of Israel is declared 🇮🇱 Ben-Gurion reads the Declaration of Independence in Tel Aviv. Eleven minutes later, the US recognizes the new state. The next morning, five armies attack.
- May 29, 1953 - Everest is summited ⛰️ Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reach the top of the world. The news reaches London just in time for Queen Elizabeth II's coronation.
- May 5, 1818 - Karl Marx is born 📖 Born in Trier to a middle-class family, he dies stateless and broke in London. Within 30 years, a third of the world lives under governments built on his ideas.
Recommendations 🌟
What I'm watching / reading / listening to this month:
📺 Series – Your Friends & Neighbors, Season 2
Jon Hamm as a suburban thief whose new neighbor is about to blow everything up. Addictive, sharp, a little outrageous. Season 2 adds James Marsden and somehow gets better. Apple TV+.
📺 Movie – F1: The Movie
Brad Pitt as a Formula One driver making a comeback after 30 years. Filmed at real Grand Prix weekends, real cars, real speed. Not realistic at all, completely fun. Apple TV+.
📚 Book – The Perfect Guests by Emma Rous
Finished this one in a week, which almost never happens for me. Two timelines, one creepy English manor. I really wanted to know how the two stories connect, so I read it fast. Twisty. Couldn't put it down.
📚 Book – The Year of the Locust by Terry Hayes
Just started it. A CIA spy in the badlands where Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan meet, facing an adversary unlike anything he's seen before. If you read his first book, I Am Pilgrim, you know what you're in for. If you haven't, start there first.
Wrap-Up
That's May.
Open deals, open questions, open sky above the sea.
I don't always know where things are going. But I've learned to trust the direction, even when the destination is blurry. Shouganai, and also: something good is coming.
In the meantime, I'm on my bike. Riding to the water. Sitting with a book. Watching the waves do what they do. Surrounding myself with the best people I chose to walk this road called life!
That's enough.
I'm also here:
You made it all the way here... thank you for sharing this coffee with me ☕❤️
Ciao!
, Tanya
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