The Three Rabbit Holes

Things Overheard at the Coffee Bar began the way many rabbit holes do: with a fragment of someone else's conversation that refused to leave our minds.

Not the hushed reverence of libraries. Not the performative discourse of conference halls. Something in between—where a graduate student explaining neural plasticity sits three feet from a parent troubleshooting their kid's screen addiction. Where someone codes an AI sorting algorithm while overhearing a debate about whether recycling actually works.

The coffee bar operates as what sociologist Ray Oldenburg called a "third place"—neither home nor work, but the informal public gathering space where community happens accidentally. In an era of algorithmic feeds and curated social media, the coffee bar remains defiantly analog: you can't control who sits next to you, can't mute conversations you disagree with, can't fast-forward through the boring parts.

This friction, it turns out, might be exactly what we need.