The Morning: ‘Whatever feeds your head’

May 16, 2026

Good morning. It’s graduation season, a time of aspiration and anxiety in fairly equal measure. Today, I’m writing about the aspiration — the wisdom to be gleaned from great commencement addresses. (Tomorrow’s newsletter will be about the anxiety.)

In an illustration, a flower grows from the top of a graduation cap.

María Jesús Contreras

Finishing school

	By Melissa Kirsch

It’s the time of year for what Susan Sontag designated “that necessarily seasonal, minor literary form called the ‘commencement address.’” In the age of memeable wisdom, the commencement address has become a social-media-ready trove of inspiration whence spring bons mots like George Saunders’s “failures of kindness,” (Syracuse, 2013); Steve Jobs’s “Stay hungry, stay foolish” (Stanford, 2005); and David Foster Wallace’s “This Is Water” parable (Kenyon, also 2005).

I appreciate a sincerely delivered secular sermon exhorting me to go in the direction of my dreams, but, like any liberal arts grad, I insist on my own specialness, and the generic nature of graduation speeches often leaves me skeptical. “The world is more malleable than you think,” Bono told the University of Pennsylvania class of 2004, “and it’s waiting for you to hammer it into shape.” I want to believe in this kind of rallying cry, but the lack of specificity in such mass encouragement can make it feel a little toothless. (Is the world waiting as eagerly for the guy who spent all second semester dozing through econ to hammer?)

The best graduation speeches, I think, are the ones grounded in personal experience, the ones that ring not only sincere, but also profoundly felt. You may not be a Taylor Swift fan, but you knew she was speaking from her soul when she told N.Y.U.’s 2022 graduates: “Never be ashamed of trying. Effortlessness is a myth.” Yes! Anyone can see that Taylor Swift tries hard, that her success has come via fist-clenching, teeth-gritting effort. “The people who wanted it the least were the ones I wanted to date and be friends with in high school,” she continued. “The people who want it most are the people I now hire to work for my company.” If a billionaire is going to genuinely connect to an audience of debt-saddled grads, she has to show that she came by her wisdom honestly. She has to truly mean it.

In George Saunders’s speech, he tells a story about a girl in his seventh-grade class who was “mostly ignored, occasionally teased,” and how he could tell this hurt her. He wasn’t mean to her, he says, but, 42 years on, he regretted that when he witnessed her suffering he responded “sensibly, reservedly, mildly.” The oft-quoted line is, “What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness,” but the line that I like even better is more direct: “What’s our problem? Why aren’t we kinder?” He goes on to propose some theories, and some solutions. I love this speech because it emerges from a relatable personal experience, and it dwells in specifics rather than conceptual oratory. Every person present has their own failures of kindness. Everyone present is implicated.

The Sontag quote at the top of this newsletter is actually from a graduation speech she gave at Wellesley College in 1983. It has one more line that I love, that, if I must receive life advice via Instagram quote card, I would be delighted to see in my feed. She tells the graduates that the most useful suggestion she can make is that they go on being students for the rest of their lives, and then says, “Don’t move to a mental slum.”

I don’t know exactly what that means, to move to a mental slum, but I find her admonition witty and hyperbolic and inarguably wise. And, like the most enduring speeches, it still has impact. Sontag wasn’t optimistic about the world into which her audience was graduating, but she felt it urgent that they not abandon their education when they exited the halls of knowledge. She concludes by telling them if they stop reading or looking at art or “whatever feeds your head now,” then they’re getting old. I think about this a lot — what feeds my head. And her sign-off was appropriately encouraging: “I wish you love. Courage. And fantasy.” I wish that for us, perpetual students all, no matter what we’re commencing this spring.

One more thing: We’re hoping to retool this newsletter a bit, just to keep it fresh and incorporate all the great things The Times can do. If you have 15 minutes to spare, it would be great to hear what you like (and don’t like) about The Morning. Take our survey here.

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Kenny Holston/The New York Times

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The New York Times

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RECIPE OF THE WEEK

Roasted ground meat and pieces of pita bread sit atop a whitish paste.

Ryan Liebe for The New York Times

By Melissa Clark

Smashed Beef Kebab With Cucumber Yogurt

It’s almost grilling weather here in New York, and that makes me crave the smoky char of a good kebab. For those who don’t have grills — or if you’re not quite ready to dust yours off for the season — take a cue from Zainab Shah, who cooks her smashed beef kebab with cucumber yogurt in a cast-iron skillet on the stove. This means anyone can make her garlicky, Persian-inspired dish without stepping outside. It’s a lovely, easy meal — and our most popular recipe of 2025 — in which a tangy cucumber yogurt sauce adds a cooling contrast to the crisp nuggets of highly spiced meat.

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Jared Skolnick and Tracy Ellen Kamens. James Estrin/The New York Times

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