When it comes to gender, marriage, family, work, and religion - we once thought of them as being fixed, but they're incredibly fluid. The same is true for love. Love was not something that was originally built between two equal partners in a relationship. It's something that's been hard-earned over time.

Social media is fine, but we need to put the phones down and look somebody in the eye. Talk to your neighbor. Talk to your community. Especially talk to the one you love. It's all about connection. It's hard, but it's ultimately what gives us meaning in the world.

You don't need a grand plan, you don't need to go back to the ancestors and rewrite the rules. You just need to take small steps and accumulate small wins.

When it comes to gender, marriage, family, work, and religion - we once thought of them as being fixed, but they're incredibly fluid. The same is true for love. Love was not something that was originally built between two equal partners in a relationship. It's something that's been hard-earned over time.

I grew up as a fifth-generation Jew in the American South, at the confluence of two great storytelling traditions. After graduating from Yale in the 1980s, I moved to Japan. For young adventure seekers like myself, the white-hot Japanese miracle held a similar appeal as Russia in 1920s or Paris in the 1950s.

When I was growing up, I, like many Jews, cheered what appeared to be the receding of faith from everyday life. The further religion got from our lives the better our lives would get, I thought, because persecution had been such a burden to Jewish families for generations.

But humans disappoint. Adam, in tasting the fruit, indicates that he prefers Eve to God, so God banishes them.