The City Trade: Trading What You Know for What Others Ask

Why put up with the inequality, the noise, the lumbering traffic and the stink? The answer depends on what you consider valuable. In my curriculum, I guide kids to the premise that collaboration across skills, interests and attitudes creates the strongest odds for sustaining  human society peacefully as climate and employment churn. 

In this essay just published on the Atlantic's redesigned CityLab, I dig into what I hope my wife and I are teaching our kids each December when we send them on a scavenger hunt that obliges them to talk to strangers. The essay runs to the sentimental, but the ideas it stirs should get you uncomfortably close to questions about fairness, access, and bias. 

It should also work as a fun read. If it clicks for you, and/or if it prompts hunts of your own with partners of any age, I hope you'll let me know.