Writer at Silicon Canals

Ainura Kalau

Writer

Ainura Kalau is a writer at Silicon Canals based in São Paulo. Born in Central Asia, she lived more than a decade in Malaysia before settling in Brazil — a path that gives her natural fluency in how innovation ecosystems differ across continents and how people, capital, and policy translate between them. She writes about cross-border technology, emerging-market dynamics, and the lived experience of building from outside the dominant hubs.

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Mind

A whole generation of parents is learning to be grandparents over video call, holding a phone up to a baby who will know their face perfectly and their smell not at all

A quiet revolution has happened in family life over the last few years, and most of us slid into it without ever deciding to.

Jul 2, 2026

Mind

Somewhere a grandchild is living through the ordinary afternoon they’ll describe, sixty years from now, as the moment they felt most safe — and no adult in the room has any idea it’s happening

Ask an adult when they felt safest in their whole life and a striking number of them will not name a wedding day or a graduation or a birthday.

Jul 2, 2026

Mind

People expect marriage to get harder with age, but many couples describe the opposite — a softening that arrives once they stop trying to change each other and start trying to enjoy what’s left

My husband's grandparents have been married forty-three years, and the clearest picture I have of their marriage is the two of them at the kitchen counter on a Sunday morning.

Jul 2, 2026

Mind

The couples who last into their seventies often aren’t the ones who never fought; they’re the ones who learned which arguments were about something real and which were just exhaustion looking for a target

Here is what is quietly at stake in a long marriage.

Jul 1, 2026

Mind

Many adults watch their own difficult parent become a patient, delighted grandparent and feel two things at once — relief for their child, and a quiet ache for the parent they themselves didn’t get

Watch enough families over time and a pattern emerges.

Jul 1, 2026

Mind

The children of parents who never said sorry often grow into adults who over-apologize for everything, still trying to model a repair they were never shown

The most considerate people in any room are often the worst offenders when it comes to apologizing.

Jul 1, 2026

Mind

What looks like slowing down in someone’s late seventies is often something gentler — the first time in their adult life they aren’t trying to earn the right to rest

The slowing down we see in people in their late seventies is not always what it looks like.

Jun 30, 2026

Mind

People who were always described as “easy to talk to” often reach their fifties realizing that being a good listener quietly excused everyone around them from ever learning to listen back

"You're so easy to talk to" sounds like a compliment, and most of the time it is meant as one.

Jun 30, 2026

Mind

People who reach their seventies genuinely content usually didn’t get there by forgiving everyone; they got there by quietly releasing the need for certain people to ever understand them

We tend to assume that the calm you see in some older people is the reward for a lifetime of forgiveness.

Jun 30, 2026

News

The generation that grew up with one shared phone in the hallway learned something their children never had to: how to be bored in front of other people without reaching for an escape

Picture a narrow hallway in a small apartment.

Jun 29, 2026

Mind

How to stop feeling guilty for wanting more than the people around you were taught to want

I am familiar with a different kind of guilt that doesn't announce itself loudly.

May 7, 2026

News

The new feminism tells women they can have it all — but it doesn’t tell them what it costs

"Have it all" is one of the most expensive lies feminism ever sold women.

May 7, 2026