Making good small talk, disagreements on authenticity, the power of warmth and more in #TheEdit.

• The bigness of small talk. The key to good small talk is to believe, if only for a moment, that it is just as urgent and consequential as any philosophical conundrum or national event – The New York Times (gift link) 
• Brené Brown and Adam Grant on what they will never agree on. How a public disagreement about authenticity almost ended their relationship before it began – The Curiosity Shop 
• The outsized power of warmth. Small signals of warmth can dramatically change how people respond to you – Big Think 
• What is taste? And do we still have it? Has the online ecosystem become so polluted – so fragmented, deceptive, overstimulating, ersatz – that it has warped our ability to exercise taste at all? – New Yorker 
• Is AI (finally) making us more productive? Will artificial intelligence mean more jobs, fewer jobs, or different jobs? – FT Podcast
• The world’s happiest countries for 2026 – and what they get right. From Nordic trust to Costa Rica’s sense of community, residents explain what daily life looks like in the countries topping the 2026 World Happiness Report  – BBC 
• Life in verse: poems that move us. A curation of our published poems to celebrate World Poetry Day, exploring the journey from hoping, being, noticing and becoming – The Beautiful Truth