Recent articles
October 17, 2026
The Map to the Route of Your Life
No one will map for you the path by which you must cross the wilderness of your own life — not your parents or your teachers, not your heroes or your lovers, not the self-help books or Shakespeare’...
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October 14, 2026
NostradamusGPT: The Psychology of Prophecy and How to Break Free from the Prison of Predictive Technologies
This is our paradox: We know that uncertainty is the substrate of the universe, is the crucible of creativity, is the path to truth, and yet we spend our lives searching for certainty. The word aus...
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October 13, 2026
Probability Theory Pioneer Mark Kac on the Unpredictability of Creativity and the Two Types of Geniuses
"Creative people live in two worlds. One is the ordinary world which they share with others and in which they are not in any special way set apart from their fellow men. The other is private and it...
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October 11, 2026
James Baldwin on How Love (Finally) Finds You
Our language betrays our self-betrayals: We speak of finding love, as if it were an undiscovered eighth continent or a habitable world in another solar system, as if it got lost like the Little Red...
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October 11, 2026
Elizabeth Gilbert on Love, Loss, and How to Move Through Grief as Grief Moves Through You
"Grief is a force of energy that cannot be controlled or predicted. It comes and goes on its own schedule. Grief does not obey your plans, or your wishes. Grief will do whatever it wants to you, wh...
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October 9, 2026
The Secret Power of Ambivalence
The most maddening thing about life is also the most beautiful: its indeterminacy. The course of our lives, the fate of our species, the future of the universe: all undecided. But because possibili...
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October 9, 2026
Sleeping Beauties: David Byrne on Why Transformative Ideas Fall Dormant and How They Awaken to Change the World
Each time you look up at the night sky, you see only ancient signals — by the time a photon has reached your pupil, the star that emitted it may be long dead. The great wonder is that its light can...
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October 8, 2026
Vincent van Gogh on Fear, Taking Risks, and How Inspired Mistakes Propel Us Forward
"However meaningless and vain, however dead life appears, the man of faith, of energy, of warmth... steps in and does something."
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October 6, 2026
A Constellation of Amazements: An Illustrated Love Letter to the Joy of Collecting Things
We are hunter-gatherers with a capacity for amazement, wired to search for an organizing principle by which to contain the chaos of reality. We organize what we find into categories and hierarchies...
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October 6, 2026
How to Criticize with Kindness: Philosopher Daniel Dennett on the Four Steps to Arguing Intelligently
"Just how charitable are you supposed to be when criticizing the views of an opponent?"
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October 6, 2026
Loneliness, Resilience, and the Right Choice: Poet Diane Ackerman on What She Learned While Working at a Suicide Prevention Hotline
"So often loneliness comes from being out of touch with parts of oneself."
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October 4, 2026
Dostoyevsky on What Makes a Good Person
We know good people when we encounter them, when they fall upon our lives like a sunbeam, like a song. But we don’t always know what makes them good. It has, of course, a lot to do with kindness. I...
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October 3, 2026
Against Brute Force: D.H. Lawrence on the Superpower of Vulnerability
"Brute force crushes many plants. Yet the plants rise again. The Pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy."
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October 3, 2026
Ocean of Stars: A Painted Poem About How to Bear the Astonishment of Life
Here we are, bewildered miracles of chemistry and chance, trembling embers of dead stars capable of sign and song, a wild bet against probability that won. We have dreamt up origin myths and cosmol...
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October 2, 2026
The Common Language of Science: Einstein’s Clarion Call to Divided Humanity in a Rare 1941 Recording
“Perfection of means and confusion of goals seem — in my opinion — to characterize our age.”
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October 1, 2026
How to Say “YES” to Your Life
It started with an urn for living gone wrong, the clay kiltering off center, resisting my every effort to force it back into shape. The harder I pushed to control it, the more it took on a life of ...
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October 1, 2026
James Baldwin’s Advice on Writing
"Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance."
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September 30, 2026
David Bowie Answers the Famous Proust Questionnaire
"Q: What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery? A: Living in fear."
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September 29, 2026
C.S. Lewis on How to Structure the Days of a Creative Life and Train the Receptive Imagination
There are, in my experience, two fundaments of the creative life: putting yourself regularly in the path of wonder and getting out of your own way in order to receive what you encounter there. Wond...
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September 28, 2026
Inner Space, Outer Space, and How to Be an Astronaut in the Cosmos of Connection: Eric Berne on the Key to True Intimacy
"A star is the glowing light inside the other person, distantly seen, brave soul’s tiny flame, too bright to approach without great courage and integrity."
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September 26, 2026
How to Speak Forest
“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way,” William Blake wrote in his most passionate letter. “As a man is, so he sees.” Because...
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September 25, 2026
Nietzsche on How to Find Yourself and the True Value of Education
"No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life."
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September 24, 2026
How to Fall in Love Better: A Field Guide to Enlightened Enchantment
Enchantment, J.R.R. Tolkien believed, is “as necessary for the health and complete functioning of the Human as is sunlight for physical life.” But enchantment is a story we tell ourselves that tell...
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September 24, 2026
Emerson on How to Trust Yourself
"It is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."
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September 23, 2026
How to Be a Poet: Elizabeth Alexander on the Yin-Yang of Connection and Contradiction
“The poets (by which I mean all artists) are finally the only people who know the truth about us,” James Baldwin wrote. “Soldiers don’t. Statesmen don’t. Priests don’t. Union leaders don’t. Only po...
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September 21, 2026
The Science of Waiting and the Art of Delay
Exploring the intersection of time and decision-making to shine a light on what it means to be human.
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September 21, 2026
Steinbeck and the Difficult Art of the Friend Breakup
"I can’t consider you a friend when out of every contact there comes some intentionally wounding thing."
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September 20, 2026
Are You Working: In Defense of the Invisible Labors of Creativitiy
Once, at the gym with a physicist friend, I was struck by how no one else in the room had any idea that while she was sweating on the treadmill with a blank stare into space, she was doing advanced...
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September 17, 2026
On Losing a Parent
We spend our lives mastering the art of losing. Our necessary losses shape us; the unnecessary, senseless, devastating losses bend our shape to test our breaking point. We can lose people to life —...
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September 16, 2026
How to Promise and How to Keep Promises from Breaking
We are creatures fragmentary but indivisible, each of us a whole that is always simpler than its parts, but complicated by the struggle for a living unison between them. Nothing betrays our partiti...
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