Recent articles
April 9, 2026
Brian Eno’s Remedy for Burnout and Despair
There comes a moment in every life when you find yourself suddenly wondering about the point of it all — the point of all that productivity, the point of so-called success, the point of the poem th...
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April 7, 2026
Between the User and the Used: Zadie Smith on Instrumentalism
The great paradox, the great pain of human relationships is that they are so often not relational: two lonelinesses colliding without real contact, one or both orienting to the other not as a perso...
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April 6, 2026
Sentinels of the Soul: Kahlil Gibran’s Moving Letter to a Soldier in a Senseless War
War is an ism — nationalism, dogmatism, capitalism — paid for by an is: the living beingness of human beings made a sacrificial offering to an ideology so powerful it has quelled the two things tha...
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April 4, 2026
The Magic of Moss and What It Teaches Us About the Art of Attentiveness to Life at All Scales
"Life [exists] only because of a myriad of synchronicities that bring us to this particular place at this particular moment. In return for such a gift, the only sane response is to glitter in reply."
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April 4, 2026
Wherever You Think There Is Nothing
We spend our lives searching for portals to the possible. They are rarely gates swung open for us by some great hand. Often, they are where we least expect them — in the chance encounter, in the sm...
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April 4, 2026
Hemingway’s Advice on Writing, Ambition, and His Reading List of Essential Books for Aspiring Writers
"In any art you're allowed to steal anything if you can make it better."
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April 3, 2026
Michael Rosen’s Sad Book: A Beautiful Anatomy of Loss, Illustrated by Quentin Blake
"Sometimes I'm sad and I don’t know why. It's just a cloud that comes along and covers me up."
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April 1, 2026
The Courage of Vulnerability: Teenage Frida Kahlo’s Moving Letters to Her First Love
One of the 35 girls among the 2,000 students at Mexico’s National Preparatory School, Frida Kahlo (July 6, 1907–July 13, 1954) was fifteen when she met Alejandro Gómez Arias. Both were passionate a...
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April 1, 2026
Why Are We Not Better Than We Are: How Poetry Saves Lives
"...a stillness in which the germ of what is not yet palpable pauses and gathers to begin one more time."
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March 31, 2026
The Intelligence of Emotions: Philosopher Martha Nussbaum on How Storytelling Rewires Us and Why Befriending Our Neediness Is Essential for Happiness
"Emotions are not just the fuel that powers the psychological mechanism of a reasoning creature, they are parts, highly complex and messy parts, of this creature’s reasoning itself."
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March 31, 2026
The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone
"Loneliness is difficult to confess; difficult too to categorise. Like depression, a state with which it often intersects, it can run deep in the fabric of a person."
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March 31, 2026
How Flamingos Got Their Pink
Against the morphological backdrop of the rest of nature, a giant pink bird on stilts sounds like something out of Lewis Carroll’s imagination. And yet flamingos came out of evolution’s laboratory,...
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March 30, 2026
Nick Cave on Creative Work as an Instrument of Self-Forgiveness and the Courage of Hope in Cynical Times
In praise of "the necessary and urgent need to love life and one another, despite the casual cruelty of the world."
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March 29, 2026
Ursula K. Le Guin on Suffering and Getting to the Other Side of Pain
"All you have is what you are, and what you give."
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March 28, 2026
Emerson on Talent vs. Character, Our Resistance to Change, and the Key to True Personal Growth
"People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them."
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March 27, 2026
Corrective for a Broken Heart
“Life will break you,” Louise Erdrich wrote in her passionate insistence that “you are here to risk your heart.” It can happen with a shattering, or with a thousand small fissures, but the great pa...
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March 24, 2026
Create Dangerously: Albert Camus on the Artist as a Voice of Resistance and an Instrument of Freedom
"To create today is to create dangerously... The question, for all those who cannot live without art and what it signifies, is merely to find out how, among the police forces of so many ideologies....
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March 24, 2026
The Invention of Zero: How Ancient Mesopotamia Created the Mathematical Concept of Nought and Ancient India Gave It Symbolic Form
"If you look at zero you see nothing; but look through it and you will see the world."
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March 23, 2026
Something Deeper Than Hope: Terry Tempest Williams on Our Stays Against Despair
“If you are now wondering where to look for consolation, where to seek a new and better God,” Hermann Hesse wrote in his wartime manifesto for hope in difficult times, “he does not come to us from ...
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March 23, 2026
Life, Loss, and the Wisdom of Rivers
"It’s a mercy that time runs in one direction only, that we see the past but darkly and the future not at all."
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March 21, 2026
This Is a Poem That Heals Fish: An Almost Unbearably Wonderful Picture-Book About How Poetry Works Its Magic
"A poem ... is when you are in love and have the sky in your mouth."
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March 20, 2026
Where Love Goes When It Goes
These passages appear on pages 126-127 of Traversal in the context of Mary Shelley’s life. Where does love go when it goes? It is a common question, contrived in its commonness yet savagely sincere...
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March 19, 2026
Reweaving the Rainbow: Divinations for Living from the Science of Life
I met Willow at a loom on a farm one late-summer day. She was amused that I thought she looked like Mary Shelley, in whose world I’d been immersed for seven years while writing Traversal. Neither o...
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March 18, 2026
The Four Desires Driving All Human Behavior: Bertrand Russell’s Magnificent Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech
"Nothing in the world is more exciting than a moment of sudden discovery or invention, and many more people are capable of experiencing such moments than is sometimes thought."
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March 18, 2026
The Measure of a Life Well Lived: Henry Miller on How to Grow Old and the Secret of Remaining Young at Heart
"If you can fall in love again and again ... if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical, man you've got it half licked."
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March 16, 2026
Roots and the Meaning of Life
They are so far out of sight for us, creatures of the upper world, that we don’t readily think of them. But as soon as we do, as soon as we plunge the mind into the cold dark hummus to which the bo...
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March 15, 2026
How to Save a Life: “Little Prince” Author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry on the Power of the Smallest Kindnesses
"Care granted to the sick, welcome offered to the banished, forgiveness itself are worth nothing without a smile enlightening the deed."
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March 14, 2026
Pi and the Seductions of Infinity
This essay and poem are part of the Universe in Verse book. “My business is circumference,” Emily Dickinson wrote in one of her most cryptic letters. Since ancient times, human beings have been enc...
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March 13, 2026
When Things Fall Apart: Tibetan Buddhist Nun and Teacher Pema Chödrön on Transformation Through Difficult Times
"Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us."
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March 13, 2026
How to Feel Whole in a Broken World: An Astronaut’s Antidote to Despair
Once our basic physical needs for sustenance and shelter are met, most of our psychological suffering is a problem of selfing — contracting the scope of reality to the pinhole of the self and using...
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