My daughter is four years old and has questions. She always has questions. That’s the nature of being four. But now, she has more. We’ve had the same conversation after breakfast nearly every day for the past two weeks of self-quarantine. It happens after my wife goes to work in our home office, which was once my office, but now, because my wife can’t go to work, it’s hers.

The news, when it reached the Grand Princess early on March 4, barely registered at first. In a letter slipped under passenger cabin doors, Grant Tarling, Carnival Corp.’s chief medical officer, announced that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control had begun “investigating a small cluster” of Covid-19 cases in California that might have been linked to the ship. Thirteen days after leaving San Francisco for Hawaii, the vessel would be skipping a scheduled stop in Mexico on its return voyage and sailing back early to its Bay Area port.

I worked at various start-ups for eight years beginning in 2010, when I was in my early 20s. Then I quit and went freelance for a while. A year later, I returned to office life, this time at a different start-up. During my gap year, I had missed and yearned for a bunch of things, like health care and free knockoff Post-its and luxurious people-watching opportunities. (In 2016, I saw a co-worker pour herself a bowl of cornflakes, add milk, and microwave it for 90 seconds. I’ll think about this until the day I die.) One thing I did not miss about office life was the language. The language warped and mutated at a dizzying rate, so it was no surprise that a new term of art had emerged during the year I spent between jobs.

Hi! Dan here — today’s post is about the Zwicky Box, a creativity tool used by the scientist Fritz Zwicky to solve hard problems. In the post below we’ll tell you what a Zwicky box is and how to use one. But we went a step further than usual to help you put this post into practice. Nathan Baschez worked all weekend to custom make a Zwicky Box tool called Superbox for you to actually try the concept out. Members can use Superbox here. Or read on for more about the Zwicky Box below.