Recent articles
August 7, 2026
How to Hold What Harrows You
We are shaped by all we have suffered — by what harrows us — and in turn shape our lives by how we hold our harrowing. Harrow shares its Middle English root with harvest. It is by suffering, and by...
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August 2, 2026
The Grasshopper and the “Lusory Attitude” Essential for Playing the Game of Life
On a recent flight, I watched a mother across the aisle play peek-a-boo with her small son while next to me a grown man in a VR headset spent six hours ascending the levels of a video game. It occu...
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August 1, 2026
Death and How to Be More Alive: Carl Jung on Immortality and the Rebirth of Middle Age
Once, I spent a year walking Brooklyn’s historic Green-Wood Cemetery daily, winding between the marble tombs engulfed by tree-roots and emblazoned with the surnames of the dead, each followed by a ...
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July 29, 2026
Kindness Over Fear: Naomi Shihab Nye Tells the Remarkable Real-Life Story That Inspired Her Beloved Poem “Kindness”
"Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, / you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing."
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July 28, 2026
The Bird in You, the World in You, and the Art of Trusting Time: A Ceramics and Serpentine Raffle
One December afternoon, I arrived in Patagonia with a big blue backpack, a small bilingual edition of Pablo Neruda’s love poems, and a broken heart. (Though a heart, of course, never breaks.) The m...
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July 24, 2026
Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde, and Ms. Boodle: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Advice on Writing to a Young Woman Aspiring to Be an Author
In late 1884, Adelaide Boodle — talented, timorous, still in her twenties — received news so thrilling she thought she was dreaming: Her favorite author was moving into the small town on the south ...
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July 23, 2026
Dostoyevsky in Love
“I love her happiness more than my own.”
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July 19, 2026
From Mitochondria to Minds: The Illustrated Science of the Psychedelic Dream Called Life
Like consciousness, like music, like love, life itself didn’t have to exist — nothing in the fundamental laws demands it. The universe could have gone on lapping at itself as a horizonless sea of p...
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July 17, 2026
How to Love: Legendary Zen Buddhist Teacher Thich Nhat Hanh on Mastering the Art of “Interbeing”
"To love without knowing how to love wounds the person we love."
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July 17, 2026
De Profundis: Patti Smith Reads Oscar Wilde’s Stirring Letter on Suffering and Transcendence, Penned in Prison
"I have got to make everything that has happened to me good for me... There is not a single degradation of the body which I must not try and make into a spiritualising of the soul."
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July 15, 2026
How to Bear Your Sorrows: Nick Cave on Integrating the Darkness of Loss with the Bright Ongoingness of Life
Few things in our culture are more wounding than the concept of healing — as if the pains and losses that we suffer are an illness, a malfunction of the psyche to be cut out like a tumor, rather th...
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July 14, 2026
How to Help Someone Change: The Samurai Guide to Giving Feedback
Few things in life are more exasperating than seeing the potential in someone you love and seeing them continually fall short of it, stumbling again and again over the same self-erected roadblocks ...
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July 13, 2026
How to Spot and How to Stop a Liar: Hannah Arendt on Deception, Self-Deception, and the Psychology of Defactualization
"No matter how large the tissue of falsehood that an experienced liar has to offer, it will never be large enough ... to cover the immensity of factuality."
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July 10, 2026
The Art of Dignity Beyond Pride: How to Move Through Heartbreak Like Frida Kahlo
“Life will break you,” Louise Erdrich wrote in her exquisite insistence that “you are here to risk your heart.” The price we pay for the risk is the great equalizer of humanity. In heartbreak, ever...
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July 8, 2026
20 Ways of Surfacing from the Blues: Sydney Smith’s 200-year-old Strategies for Raising Low Spirits in a Letter of Advice to a 13-year-old Girl
Elizabeth Bishop’s memorial service opened with a reflection by her partner Alice — whose near-loss inspired one of the greatest poems ever written — that included what Elizabeth had always told he...
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July 4, 2026
The Art of Losing and the Art of Beckoning Love Back: The Story Behind One of the Greatest Poems Ever Written
You wouldn’t have bet on it, the frail famous poet teaching at Harvard as a visiting professor and the athletic secretary of the campus residence half her age. But every great love exists against p...
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July 1, 2026
The Violinist Who Solved the Ancient Riddle of How the World Holds Together
This essay is adapted from Traversal. She is looking at the staff lines of a strange symphony in blue, her cautious disbelief punctured by a burst of delirious wonderment. Brushes and tubes of pain...
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July 1, 2026
Tolkien Reads from “The Hobbit” in Rare Archival Audio from His First Encounter with a Tape Recorder
“He was Gollum — as dark as darkness, except for two big round pale eyes.”
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July 1, 2026
Now Yourself: The Elusive Science of What the Present Moment Is Made of and How It Makes You Who You Are
“Whatever has happened, whatever is going to happen in the world, it is the living moment that contains the sum of the excitement, this moment in which we touch life and all the energy of the past ...
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June 29, 2026
Legendary Cellist Pablo Casals, at Age 93, on Creative Vitality and How Working with Love Prolongs Your Life
"The man who works and is never bored is never old. Work and interest in worthwhile things are the best remedy for age."
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June 27, 2026
Legendary Artist Sheila Hicks, at 92, on the Secret to Creative Vitality
Art, Georgia O’Keeffe believed, springs from “the desire to make the unknown known… and keeping the unknown always beyond you.” We seem to have drifted lightyears away from that motive force, the m...
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June 26, 2026
Georgia O’Keeffe on What It Means to Be an Artist
“Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant—there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing—and keeping the unknown always beyond you…”
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June 26, 2026
True Love Will Find You in the End: Kurt Vonnegut on When to Stop Trying and When to Try Again
Climbing the Andes one windy January afternoon, watching peak after peek emerge on the horizon like giant mounds of moss, I found myself wondering about the clear line toward the top where the gree...
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June 25, 2026
Kurt Vonnegut’s Life-Advice to His Children
Educate yourself, welcome life's messiness, read Chekhov, avoid becoming an architect at all costs.
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June 24, 2026
Epictetus on Love and Loss: The Stoic Strategy for Surviving Heartbreak
"Who is good if he knows not who he is? and who knows what he is, if he forgets that things which have been made are perishable, and that it is not possible for one human being to be with another a...
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June 24, 2026
Diatoms and the Meaning of Life
In 1703, the world’s most esteemed scientific journal published a surprising letter from an anonymous correspondent. (At the time, until well into the twentieth century, anonymity often meant the s...
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June 21, 2026
Life Is a Story That Begins in the Middle: Bayo Akomolafe on the Rewilding Power of Obstacles
Whenever there is a will, there are two things: a way and an obstacle in the way — that place midway between desire and destination where one’s will collides with the will of the world, with the pa...
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June 20, 2026
The Man Who Thought with His Heart: George Forster and the Birth of Sensitive Science
Every mind, even the greatest, is a product of its time and place. The true visionaries are those unwilling to mistake the figments of their culture for facts; those daring enough to look at the wo...
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June 17, 2026
The Meaning of Maturity: Ursula K. Le Guin on What It Really Takes to Grow Up
It is not merely a matter of growing bones and growing responsibilities, this business of growing up, this unfinishable project of becoming ourselves. It is less like the evolutionary diagram of th...
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June 16, 2026
What Makes a Person: The Seven Layers of Selfhood in Literature and Life
"It is the intentions, the capacities for choice rather than the total configuration of traits which defines the person."
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