Recent articles
May 24, 2026
Swimming and the Meaning of Life
One of my earliest and most vivid childhood memories is of swimming in a cool pool bounded by boulders in the middle of a river in the mountains of Bulgaria, the late-afternoon sun casting komorebi...
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May 22, 2026
How Not to Dwell on the Past
“We can never go back,” bell hooks wrote in her moving reckoning with love. “We can go forward. We can find the love our hearts long for, but not until we let go grief about the love we lost long a...
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May 21, 2026
Truth, Fact, and the Patterning of Reality: Virginia Woolf on How We Come to Know the World
The great myth is that truth is an emergent property of fact, that it bubbles up from the bottom of reality once the mind attains enough fathoms of factuality. But objective reality — all those thi...
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May 19, 2026
bell hooks on the Power of Being in the Margins
Fifteen years into reading and writing in order to learn how to live, I looked back on these marginalia on the search for meaning and realized that the people whose lives and work have most moved m...
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May 17, 2026
What It’s Like to Be a Panda
“What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?” Stephen Hawking wondered, recognizing the quixotic nature of his quest for a theory of everything — a c...
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May 15, 2026
The Art of Looking: Eleven Ways of Viewing the Multiple Realities of Our Everyday Wonderland
"Attention is an intentional, unapologetic discriminator. It asks what is relevant right now, and gears us up to notice only that."
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May 14, 2026
In Praise of the Useless: Bertrand Russell’s Salve for Hard Times
Along the way of life, I have discovered three things you can almost always do in your darkest hour that almost never fail to recover the light: Learn something. Help someone. Feel it all. We need ...
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May 13, 2026
How to Keep Criticism from Sinking Your Soul: Walt Whitman and the Discipline of Creative Confidence
"I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood."
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May 12, 2026
The Enemy Outside and the Enemy Within: Audre Lorde’s Antidote to Despair
“There is no love of life without despair of life,” Albert Camus wrote between two world wars. There are many species of despair — the private despair of ill health and heartbreak, the public despa...
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May 10, 2026
Zadie Smith on the Courage to Be More Than Yourself
Every act of learning is an act of intellectual appropriation, incorporating someone else’s knowledge into your own mental library. Every act of empathy is an act of emotional appropriation, modeli...
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May 9, 2026
Martian Gargoyles and Lunar Fish: Chilean Artist Alejandra Acosta’s Wondrous Embroidered Illustrations for This World’s First Book Theorizing Life on Other Worlds
It is the sunset of the 1600s. Milton has just pioneered the use of the word space to connote outer space. Kepler has just pioneered science fiction by imagining space travel, but going only as far...
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May 8, 2026
Poetry: I Too, Dislike It
I was a latecomer to poetry, curling my nose at it in that confounding and rather embarrassing way we have of discounting what we don’t understand, dismissing as useless what we don’t know how to u...
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May 6, 2026
Ecology, Empire, Emoji: The Bittersweet Story of the Ancient Plant That Originated the Heart Symbol
There we were: Three women — a neuroscientist, a mycologist, and me — talking about the perplexities of love when a cloud in the perfect shape of a broken heart appeared in the gloaming sky backlit...
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May 6, 2026
Philosopher Martha Nussbaum on How to Live with Our Human Fragility
"To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control."
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May 6, 2026
Pythagoras on the Purpose of Life and the Meaning of Wisdom
Abiding insight into the aim of human existence from the man who revolutionized science and coined the word "philosopher."
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May 5, 2026
Viktor Frankl on Success
In 1945, shortly after his release from the concentration camps where his mother and brother had been murdered in the gas chambers, not yet knowing the love of his life was ailing with the typhus t...
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May 5, 2026
Kierkegaard on How to Channel Anxiety into Creativity
"Because it is possible to create -- creating one's self, willing to be one's self, as well as creating in all the innumerable daily activities -- one has anxiety. One would have no anxiety if ther...
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May 5, 2026
Simone de Beauvoir on Marriage and the Freedom to Change
A self is a story we tell to bridge who we are and who we have been, turning the fluidity of personhood into a resin of narrative that hardens with each retelling. “If we are creatures of time, the...
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May 5, 2026
Trying Not to Try: Finding Freedom from Striving in the Ancient Chinese Concept of Wu-Wei
"Our modern conception of human excellence is too often impoverished, cold, and bloodless. Success does not always come from thinking more rigorously or striving harder."
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May 3, 2026
Hannah Arendt on the Power of Being an Outsider
"We humanize what is going on in the world and in ourselves only by speaking of it, and in the course of speaking of it we learn to be human."
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May 3, 2026
Mary Oliver on the Measure of a Life Well Lived and How to Magnify Your Aliveness
"Do you need a prod? Do you need a little darkness to get you going?"
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May 2, 2026
The Day I Became a Bird: A Tender Illustrated Parable of Falling in Love and Learning to Unmask Our True Selves
Imaginative assurance that we are worthy of love just as we are.
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May 1, 2026
The Wildest Bet Is the Winning Bet
We place life’s bets by countless calculations of probability, conscious and unconscious, only to discover over and over how short they fall of the wildest reaches of the possible, which always inc...
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April 27, 2026
The Black Robin and the Power of Tenacious Tenderness: How a Single Mother Brought an Entire Species Back from the Brink of Extinction
This essay is adapted from Traversal. “In the great chain of cause and effect,” Alexander von Humboldt wrote as he was teaching science to read the poetry of nature, “no single fact can be consider...
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April 27, 2026
The Difficult Balance of Intimacy and Independence: Beloved Philosopher and Poet Kahlil Gibran on the Secret to a Loving and Lasting Relationship
"Love one another but make not a bond of love: let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls."
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April 26, 2026
The Force and the Flower: Poet and Potter M.C. Richards on Creativity
In a recent conversation with my poetic physicist friend Alan Lightman, sparring over whether the creative spirit can be usefully divided into complementary arts and science (Alan’s view) or whethe...
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April 24, 2026
The Bird That Is Your Life
The great danger is to stand motionless on the bank as the river of your life rushes by. It is not easy, learning how to stop waiting and start living; not easy not to waste your life; not easy kno...
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April 23, 2026
The Invention of Empathy: Rilke, Rodin, and the Art of “Inseeing”
How a doctor, a philosopher, a poet, and a sculptor co-created the modern concept of empathy.
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April 23, 2026
Oliver Sacks on Gratitude, the Measure of Living, and the Dignity of Dying
"I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure."
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April 23, 2026
Marianne Moore on the There Elements of Persuasive Writing
Several years ago, rummaging through the archives of the Academy of American Poets, I came upon a box labeled “Ballots 1950” — the record of the secret vote by the chancellors the year the Academy’...
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