Recent articles
February 23, 2026
Dostoyevsky on Why There Are No Bad People
"A true friend of mankind whose heart has but once quivered in compassion over the sufferings of the people, will understand and forgive all the impassable alluvial filth in which they are submerge...
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February 22, 2026
The Mattering Instinct
Here we are, watched over by the stone faces of mountains creased with the laugh-lines of time as we walk over the bones of our dead, over the fossils of all the other animals who paid with their l...
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February 21, 2026
Seneca on Grief and the Key to Resilience in the Face of Loss: An Extraordinary Letter to His Mother
"All your sorrows have been wasted on you if you have not yet learned how to be wretched."
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February 20, 2026
How Do You Know That You Love Somebody? Philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s Incompleteness Theorem of the Heart’s Truth, from Plato to Proust
"The alternations between love and its denial, suffering and denial of suffering … constitute the most essential and ubiquitous structural feature of the human heart."
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February 20, 2026
Walt Whitman’s Advice on Living a Vibrant and Rewarding Life
“Love the earth and sun and the animals… re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul…”
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February 19, 2026
The Color of Wonder and the Chemical Code of Creation
This essay is adapted from Traversal. We look at a thing — a bird, a ball, a planet — and perceive it to be a certain color. But what we are really seeing is the color that does not inhere in it—th...
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February 19, 2026
Einstein, Gödel, and Our Strange Experience of Time: Rebecca Goldstein on How Relativity Rattled the Flow of Existence
"Is there anything we know more intimately than the fleetingness of time, the transience of each and every moment?"
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February 18, 2026
How to Shed the Surface-Self: The Forgotten Visionary Evelyn Underhill on Touching the Depths of Being
It is hard to know why we are here, what we can make of the transience we can do nothing about, how we can fill every borrowed atom of matter with meaning. It is hard not to take for givens the ans...
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February 18, 2026
Love After Life: Nobel-Winning Physicist Richard Feynman’s Extraordinary Letter to His Departed Wife
Where the hard edge of physics meets the vulnerable metaphysics of the human heart.
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February 18, 2026
Hermann Hesse on Solitude, the Value of Hardship, the Courage to Be Yourself, and How to Find Your Destiny
"Solitude is not chosen, any more than destiny is chosen. Solitude comes to us if we have within us the magic stone that attracts destiny."
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February 17, 2026
Mary Oliver on What Attention Really Means and Her Moving Elegy for Her Soul Mate
"Attention without feeling ... is only a report."
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February 15, 2026
Be Like Water: The Philosophy and Origin of Bruce Lee’s Famous Metaphor for Resilience
"In order to control myself I must first accept myself by going with and not against my nature."
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February 14, 2026
Albert Camus on the Will to Live and the Most Important Question of Existence
"The body’s judgment is as good as the mind’s... We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking."
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February 13, 2026
The Monarchs, Music, and the Meaning of Life: The Most Touching Deathbed Love Letter Ever Written
From butterflies to Beethoven, an ode to the heart's uncontainable dimensions.
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February 11, 2026
Why You
A self is a story of why you are you — a selective retelling of the myriad chance events between the birth of the universe and this moment: atoms bonding one way and not another, parents bonding wi...
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February 11, 2026
Blaise Pascal on the Intuitive vs. the Logical Mind and How We Come to Know Truth
"The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know..."
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February 10, 2026
How We Grieve: Meghan O’Rourke on the Messiness of Mourning and Learning to Live with Loss
"The people we most love do become a physical part of us, ingrained in our synapses, in the pathways where memories are created."
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February 9, 2026
Albert Camus on the Three Antidotes to the Absurdity of Life
"In a world whose absurdity appears to be so impenetrable, we simply must reach a greater degree of understanding among men, a greater sincerity."
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February 8, 2026
The Blessing of Burnout: Samin Nosrat on the Faustian Bargain of Achievement and the Simple Substance of the Good Life
We live in a bipolar epoch — on one end, the blamethirsty finger of cancel culture and politicized othering; on the other, the zeal for designating people, real human beings with real human lives, ...
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February 7, 2026
Relationship Rupture and the Limbic System: The Physiology of Abandonment and Separation
"A relationship is a physiologic process, as real and as potent as any pill or surgical procedure."
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February 7, 2026
A Life of One’s Own: A Penetrating Century-Old Field Guide to Self-Possession, Mindful Perception, and the Art of Knowing What You Really Want
"I did not know that I could only get the most out of life by giving myself up to it."
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February 6, 2026
The Story Behind Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” and the Poet’s Own Stirring Reading of His Masterpiece
"Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
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February 6, 2026
Dying Mothers, the Birth of Handwashing, and the Bittersweet True Love Story Behind ‘Frankenstein’
This essay is adapted from Traversal. “Death may snatch me from you, before you can weigh my advice,” Mary Wollstonecraft wrote in the philosophical novel she wouldn’t live to finish, addressing a ...
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February 6, 2026
The Reason of Emotion: Bruce Lee’s Unpublished Writings on Willpower, Imagination, and Confidence
"You will never get any more out of life than you expect."
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February 5, 2026
Kandinsky on the Spiritual Element in Art and the Three Responsibilities of Artists
"To harmonize the whole is the task of art."
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February 5, 2026
How Pioneering Physicist Lise Meitner Discovered Nuclear Fission, Paved the Way for Women in Science, and Was Denied the Nobel Prize
"Science makes people reach selflessly for truth and objectivity; it teaches people to accept reality, with wonder and admiration, not to mention the deep joy and awe that the natural order of thin...
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February 4, 2026
Sleep and the Meaning of Life: Fernando Pessoa on the Existential Dimension of the Horizontal Hours
One of the most important things I have learned about living is that, in any life of purpose and creative vitality, you must be as religious and disciplined about your sleep as about your work. And...
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February 1, 2026
How to Grow Old: Bertrand Russell on What Makes a Fulfilling Life
"Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life."
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February 1, 2026
Anaïs Nin on How Reading Awakens Us from the Slumber of Almost-Living
"It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it."
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February 1, 2026
Georgia O’Keeffe on the Art of Seeing
"To see takes time, like to have a friend takes time."
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