We ran out of beans, with 8 inches of snow outside and the mercury hovering around freezing. At times like these, we make chai. I haven’t been drinking it since I turned vegan because plant milks just don’t work as well in chai; they’re not fat enough to cut the acridity that a strong Indian black tea possesses.

Got me thinking.

If the Aeropress can strip the acidity from coffee to produce a full-bodied but smooth cupful, could it do the same for black tea? Turns out it can.

I use the upside-down method of brewing with the Aeropress. Milk…

There’ve been a lot of discussions about how shortform works, so we thought a quick primer might help. We’re also making an update to help shortform earn on Medium.

Shortform is any story under 150 words (including title and subtitle), and it is eligible to earn money if it is metered. Like all stories on Medium, shortform earns based on reading time on its story page, not simply viewing it in a feed.

A few months ago, we made reading more frictionless on Medium by switching to a single stream of stories on profile and publication homepages, making it easier…

Your Medium profile is where readers get to know more about you, to see the face behind the name, the mind behind the words. For writers, it’s a place to showcase ideas for the millions of curious eyes and hungry minds that flock to Medium each day. Your profile should be every bit as distinct as the stories you publish in it. But it isn’t. Today, we take the first step towards changing that.

In an effort to empower individual creators, we’ve taken what we learned from developing expressive tools for publications and brought it to everyone’s Medium profile. You…

I’ve always struggled with the way devi is portrayed in imagery or sculpture. She looked nothing like my mother. And my mother was everything like her.

The closest I come to meditating: riding this perfectly paved path, nestled between a lush grove of ancient hardwood and abandoned cliffside tracks. Feeling the steel-damped static of the road like a drunk bee trapped in my bones. The slightest whisper of a breeze caressing all of me at once, I am weightless yet connected. In control without wanting to be. My mind is quiet, asleep, hyper-aware, and at peace.

Highly recommended.

The short answer is yes (as I quickly learned from those that read a draft of this story 🙄) But since I’m not as well-read in these matters, I had to find my own way to it. My way was fun-ner.

It all began with an itch to recreate one of my favorite t-shirts. It used to be made by Tantra, and I think I was wearing it the day I landed in New York in 2004. The shirt was pun-ny. If you speak Hindi, you’ll get it. But that bit’s not important.

What is important, and got me thinking…

The new shower hose attachment thingy I purchased at Home Depot over the weekend is one of these. It is undeniably ugly—made of cheap-looking, mismatched bits of plastic, it has to be forced over your shower faucet and restrained with a punitive metal tie to provide a makeshift handheld showerhead. My internal groan is almost audible.

But this new appendage turns showers for my 4 year-old into gleeful play instead of work for me. Not to mention saving me the trouble of tearing down a wall to install the real thing. The kid is done in about 10 minutes, beaming…

In the past few years I’ve made several changes to be more ecologically responsible—use less, reduce, reuse, recycle. These seemingly small changes, though relatively easy in a place like New York, took a lot of effort. I want to acknowledge others like myself, battling away silently in homes and offices, and hope to lend them a hand. This list is for them, and those who want to join in, do more.

Guiding principle

Avoid stuff unless it’s absolutely essential, will be used for a long time, replaces one or more items, and can be recycled or reused. …