🍳 Introducing Soft Boil

Stories on the slow, stubborn work of change

Here’s the thing about trying to change the world.

It’s a bit like trying to persuade a donkey to dance. It’s slow, stubborn work. But sometimes, if you squint and tilt your head just right, you see a kind of beauty in it—a raw, scrappy grace in the way people keep showing up, again and again, to push for something better.

Soft Boil is for them.

Soft Boil is for us.

It’s about those who believe and do the difficult, messy, glorious work of transformation. It’s the development folks sweating through endless conferences, the activists screaming into bullhorns, the policymakers drowning in paperwork, the corporates dreaming up bold CSR moves, and the everyday people trying to do better. We want to bring them together in asking—and answering—the tough and sometimes simple questions.

What’s working? What’s not?

Who gets to claim progress and who bears its costs?

What does it actually mean to make a difference?

How can we do the most good? 

The answers won’t always be neat. Development, social change, whatever you want to call it — it’s messy. It’s uncomfortable. And it demands that we look harder, push beyond the surface and arrive at clarity. So, that’s what we’re doing on Soft Boil.

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Soft Boil is a place for deeply human, personal, fresh storytelling about the people and organisations who are trying, experimenting, failing, learning, and slowly, painfully, making things better.

Stories that go beyond plugs and live in the hands of people who carry the weight of change. It is no burden. There are men leading the charge in women’s reproductive health. The teens striking on Fridays for climate justice, the coders using AI to bring education to children the system missed. Scientists exposing the politics of public health. Women cricketers smashing centuries of gender bias. Runners doing the slow, deliberate work reshaping their bodies. All of these don’t fit into the usual narrative arcs of success or failure, impact and metrics.

In the months ahead, you’ll find perspectives here that connect people, planet, and progress in ways that challenge and elevate the way we think about change, growth and ‘development’. Conversations with the smartest people leading the charge in rethinking what is possible. Lessons from social impact work that aren’t locked away in donor reports, but accessible to everyone. Stories that trigger a collective reimagining of our relationship to one another and this pale blue dot we inhabit. 

Earth, 1.44 billion km away in this image, appears as a blue dot at bottom right in this photo of Saturn’s rings taken on the international Cassini spacecraft in 2013. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute)

And who knows? Maybe, somewhere along the way, we’ll figure out how to make that stubborn donkey of a world do a little more than just shuffle its feet. 

Maybe, just maybe, we’ll get it to dance.

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