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Longform Stories

Oliver Sacks on Memory, Originality, and Why Forgetting is Necessary for Creativity

1d ago·1 min read·29 words

Moonlight and the Magic of the Unnecessary

2d ago·1 min read·109 words

Swimming and the Meaning of Life

3d ago·1 min read·108 words

How to Live Fully: Ursula K. Le Guin’s Remedy for Our Resistance to Change

3d ago·1 min read·116 words

The Log from the Sea of Cortez: John Steinbeck’s Forgotten Masterpiece on How to Think and the Art of Seeing the Pattern Beyond the Particular

4d ago·1 min read·34 words

How Not to Dwell on the Past

5d ago·1 min read·109 words

How Evolution Invented Faith: The Patience of the Penguin and the Art of Withstanding Abandonment

6d ago·1 min read·117 words

Truth, Fact, and the Patterning of Reality: Virginia Woolf on How We Come to Know the World

May 21·1 min read·119 words

How Do We Know What We Want: Milan Kundera on the Central Ambivalences of Life and Love

May 20·1 min read·54 words

Seneca on Grief and the Key to Resilience in the Face of Loss: An Extraordinary Letter to His Mother

May 19·1 min read·37 words

Obsidian and the Birds: An Odyssey of Wonder from the Aztecs to the Quantum World

May 19·1 min read·117 words

bell hooks on the Power of Being in the Margins

May 19·1 min read·112 words

“Little Prince” Author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry on Friendship

May 18·1 min read·35 words

Chance, Choice, and the Avocado: The Strange Evolutionary and Creative History of Earth’s Most Nutritious Fruit

May 18·1 min read·34 words

Nick Cave on the Two Pillars of a Meaningful Life

May 17·1 min read·27 words

What It’s Like to Be a Panda

May 17·1 min read·109 words

Middle Age and the Art of Self-Renewal: An Extraordinary Letter from Pioneering Education Reformer Elizabeth Peabody

May 17·1 min read·50 words

The Art of Looking: Eleven Ways of Viewing the Multiple Realities of Our Everyday Wonderland

May 15·1 min read·36 words

In Praise of the Useless: Bertrand Russell’s Salve for Hard Times

May 14·1 min read·113 words

On Children: Poignant Parenting Advice from Kahlil Gibran

May 14·1 min read·59 words

How to Keep Criticism from Sinking Your Soul: Walt Whitman and the Discipline of Creative Confidence

May 13·1 min read·16 words

How to Be Un-Dead: Anaïs Nin and D.H. Lawrence on the Key to Living Fully

May 13·1 min read·15 words

The Enemy Outside and the Enemy Within: Audre Lorde’s Antidote to Despair

May 12·1 min read·12 words

Bloom: A Touching Animated Short Film about Depression and What It Takes to Recover the Light of Being

May 12·1 min read·18 words

Let Your Heart Be Broken

May 11·1 min read·5 words

How to Grow Old: Bertrand Russell on What Makes a Fulfilling Life

May 10·1 min read·12 words

Zadie Smith on the Courage to Be More Than Yourself

May 10·1 min read·10 words

How to Live a Miraculous Life

May 10·1 min read·6 words

Walt Whitman’s Advice on Living a Vibrant and Rewarding Life

May 10·1 min read·10 words

Martian Gargoyles and Lunar Fish: Chilean Artist Alejandra Acosta’s Wondrous Embroidered Illustrations for This World’s First Book Theorizing Life on Other Worlds

May 9·1 min read·22 words

3 Kinds of Loneliness and 4 Kinds of Forever

May 8·1 min read·9 words

Gary Snyder on How to Unbreak the World

May 8·1 min read·8 words

Poetry: I Too, Dislike It

May 8·1 min read·5 words

The Neurophysiology of Enchantment: How Music Casts Its Spell on Us

May 7·1 min read·11 words

The Third Thing: Poet Donald Hall on the Secret to Lasting Love

May 7·1 min read·12 words

Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” Brought to Life in a Spanish Flashmob of 100 Musicians

May 7·1 min read·14 words

Ecology, Empire, Emoji: The Bittersweet Story of the Ancient Plant That Originated the Heart Symbol

May 6·1 min read·15 words

Philosopher Martha Nussbaum on How to Live with Our Human Fragility

May 6·1 min read·11 words

Pythagoras on the Purpose of Life and the Meaning of Wisdom

May 6·1 min read·11 words

Embodiment and the (Re)invention of Emoji, from the Aztecs to Humboldt and Darwin to AI

May 6·1 min read·15 words

Viktor Frankl on Success

May 5·1 min read·4 words

Virginia Woolf on Finding Beauty in the Uncertainty of Time, Space, and Being

May 5·1 min read·13 words

Kierkegaard on How to Channel Anxiety into Creativity

May 5·1 min read·8 words

Simone de Beauvoir on Marriage and the Freedom to Change

May 5·1 min read·10 words

Arundhati Roy on the Deepest Measure of Success

May 5·1 min read·8 words

Trying Not to Try: Finding Freedom from Striving in the Ancient Chinese Concept of Wu-Wei

May 5·1 min read·15 words

How to Be More Alive: Hermann Hesse on Wonder and the Proper Aim of Education

May 4·1 min read·15 words

Consolation for Sorrow from King Arthur’s Court: Merlyn’s Advice on What to Do When the World Gets You Down

May 4·1 min read·19 words

Hannah Arendt on the Power of Being an Outsider

May 3·1 min read·9 words

Mary Oliver on the Measure of a Life Well Lived and How to Magnify Your Aliveness

May 3·1 min read·16 words

The Wanting Monster: A Tender Modern Fable about the Difficult Art of Resting at the Still Point of Enough

May 2·1 min read·19 words

The Day I Became a Bird: A Tender Illustrated Parable of Falling in Love and Learning to Unmask Our True Selves

May 2·1 min read·21 words

The Dandelion and the Meaning of Life: G.K. Chesterton on How to Dig for the “Submerged Sunrise of Wonder”

May 1·1 min read·19 words

The Wildest Bet Is the Winning Bet

May 1·1 min read·7 words

The One Hundred Milliseconds Between the World and You: Oliver Sacks on Perception

May 1·1 min read·13 words

Polyvagal Theory and the Neurobiology of Connection: The Science of Rupture, Repair, and Reciprocity

Apr 29·1 min read·14 words

An Occasion for Unselfing: Iris Murdoch on Imperfection and How to Be More Unselfish

Apr 28·1 min read·14 words

The Black Robin and the Power of Tenacious Tenderness: How a Single Mother Brought an Entire Species Back from the Brink of Extinction

Apr 27·1 min read·23 words

The Difficult Balance of Intimacy and Independence: Beloved Philosopher and Poet Kahlil Gibran on the Secret to a Loving and Lasting Relationship

Apr 27·1 min read·22 words

The Force and the Flower: Poet and Potter M.C. Richards on Creativity

Apr 26·1 min read·12 words

Grace Against Gravity and the Physics of Vulnerability: How Birds Fly and Why They Flock in a V Formation

Apr 26·1 min read·19 words

Octavia Butler on Religion and the Spirituality of Symbiosis

Apr 26·1 min read·9 words

The Bird That Is Your Life

Apr 24·1 min read·6 words

Wilderness, Solitude, and Creativity: Artist and Philosopher Rockwell Kent’s Century-Old Meditations on Art and Life During Seven Months on a Small Alaskan Island

Apr 24·1 min read·23 words

Marianne Moore on the There Elements of Persuasive Writing

Apr 23·1 min read·9 words

The Invention of Empathy: Rilke, Rodin, and the Art of “Inseeing”

Apr 23·1 min read·11 words

Oliver Sacks on Gratitude, the Measure of Living, and the Dignity of Dying

Apr 23·1 min read·13 words

The First Scientist’s Guide to Truth: Alhazen on Critical Thinking

Apr 22·1 min read·10 words

A Place for Intimacy: bell hooks on Language and Desire

Apr 21·1 min read·10 words

The Woman Who Saved Native Song

Apr 21·1 min read·6 words

How Two Souls Can Interact with One Another: Simone de Beauvoir on Love and Friendship

Apr 21·1 min read·15 words

Walt Whitman, Shortly After His Paralytic Stroke, on What Makes Life Worth Living

Apr 19·1 min read·13 words

The Experience Machine: Cognitive Philosopher Andy Clark on the Power of Expectation and How the Mind Renders Reality

Apr 19·1 min read·18 words

Erich Fromm on the Key to Sanity

Apr 18·1 min read·7 words

No One You Love Is Ever Dead: Hemingway on the Most Devastating of Losses and the Meaning of Life

Apr 18·1 min read·19 words

Walt Whitman’s Field Guide to Being Yourself: The Trial and Triumph of Leaves of Grass

Apr 18·1 min read·15 words

Mary Oliver’s Advice on Writing

Apr 17·1 min read·5 words

Orcas and the Price of Consciousness: Lessons in Love and Loss from Earth’s Most Successful and Creative Predator

Apr 17·1 min read·18 words

The Thing Itself: C.S. Lewis on What We Long for in Our Existential Longing

Apr 17·1 min read·14 words

Rehabilitating the Active Imagination: Samantha Harvey on How to Be a Reader in the Age of Fractured Attention

Apr 17·1 min read·18 words

William James on the Psychology of Habit

Apr 16·1 min read·7 words

The Kiln and the Quantum of Relationships

Apr 15·1 min read·7 words

How to Live Fully: Ursula K. Le Guin’s Remedy for Our Resistance to Change

Apr 15·1 min read·14 words

Enchantment and the Courage of Joy: René Magritte on the Antidote to the Banality of Pessimism

Apr 15·1 min read·16 words

Is This Blue: Chilean Philosophers Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela on Love and How We Know the World

Apr 14·1 min read·18 words

Of Stars, Seagulls, and Love: Loren Eiseley on the First and Final Truth of Life

Apr 14·1 min read·15 words

How to Conquer Self-Doubt and Overcome Creative Block: Artist SoLewitt’s Magnificent Letter of Advice

Apr 14·1 min read·14 words

Flowers for Things I Don’t Know How to Say: A Tender Painted Lexicon of Consolation and Connection

Apr 13·1 min read·17 words

Christopher Hitchens on Mortality

Apr 13·1 min read·4 words

How to See More Clearly and Love More Purely: Iris Murdoch on the Angst of Not Knowing Ourselves and Each Other

Apr 13·1 min read·21 words

The Importance of Being Scared: Polish Nobel Laureate Wisława Szymborska on Fairy Tales and the Necessity of Fear

Apr 12·1 min read·18 words

Leonard Cohen on the Antidote to Anger and the Meaning of Resistance

Apr 12·1 min read·12 words

How to Make the Impossible Possible: Cristina Campo on the Crucial Difference Between Hope and Trust

Apr 12·1 min read·16 words

Decoding the Mystery of Intuition: AI Prophet Margaret Boden on the Three Elements of Creativity

Apr 12·1 min read·15 words

The Eternal Lyric of Love and Loss: “Goodnight Moon” Author Margaret Wise Brown’s Little-Known Poems for the Tragic Love of Her Life

Apr 11·1 min read·22 words

Trial, Triumph, and the Art of the Possible: The Remarkable Story Behind Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”

Apr 11·1 min read·16 words

Erich Fromm’s 6 Rules of Listening: The Great Humanistic Philosopher and Psychologist on the Art of Unselfish Understanding

Apr 11·1 min read·18 words

The Work of Happiness: May Sarton’s Stunning Poem About Being at Home in Yourself

Apr 11·1 min read·14 words

A General Theory of Possibility: The Abstract Art of Otherwise and the Physics of Resilience

Apr 10·1 min read·15 words

Václav Havel on How to Hold Your Failure

Apr 10·1 min read·8 words

The Day Hermann Hesse Discovered the Meaning of Life in a Tree

Apr 10·1 min read·12 words

George Saunders on the Antidote to Regret

Apr 9·1 min read·7 words

Brian Eno’s Remedy for Burnout and Despair

Apr 9·1 min read·7 words

How to Be a Good Explorer on the Lifelong Expedition to Yourself

Apr 9·1 min read·12 words

Unselfing into Oneness with the All: The Forgotten Visionary Margaret Fuller on Transcendence

Apr 8·1 min read·13 words

Kafka’s Approach to Creative Block and the Four Psychological Hindrances That Keep the Gifted from Living Up to Their Gifts

Apr 8·1 min read·20 words

Pioneering Psychiatrist Donald Winnicott on the Qualities of a Healthy Mind and a Healthy Relationship

Apr 8·1 min read·15 words

Thomas Bernhard on Walking, Thinking, and the Paradox of Self-Reflection

Apr 7·1 min read·10 words

A Heron’s Antidote to Fear of Death

Apr 7·1 min read·7 words

Between the User and the Used: Zadie Smith on Instrumentalism

Apr 7·1 min read·10 words

Hermann Hesse on Discovering the Soul Beneath the Self and the Key to Finding Peace

Apr 6·1 min read·15 words

Sentinels of the Soul: Kahlil Gibran’s Moving Letter to a Soldier in a Senseless War

Apr 6·1 min read·15 words

Diseases of the Will: Neuroscience Founding Father Santiago Ramón y Cajal on the Six Psychological Flaws That Keep the Gifted from Living Up to Their Gift

Apr 5·1 min read·26 words

Relationship Rupture and the Limbic System: The Physiology of Abandonment and Separation

Apr 5·1 min read·12 words

Any Common Desolation

Apr 5·1 min read·3 words

The Art of Befriending Time and Change: Debbie Millman’s Illustrated Love Letter to Gardening as a Portal to Self-discovery

Apr 4·1 min read·19 words

The Magic of Moss and What It Teaches Us About the Art of Attentiveness to Life at All Scales

Apr 4·1 min read·19 words

The Pattern Inside the Pattern: Fractals, the Hidden Order Beneath Chaos, and the Story of the Refugee Who Revolutionized the Mathematics of Reality

Apr 4·1 min read·23 words

Wherever You Think There Is Nothing

Apr 4·1 min read·6 words

Hemingway’s Advice on Writing, Ambition, and His Reading List of Essential Books for Aspiring Writers

Apr 4·1 min read·15 words

The Measure of a Rich Life: Wendell Berry on Delight as a Force of Resistance and the Key to Felicitous Sanity During Hardship

Apr 3·1 min read·23 words

Michael Rosen’s Sad Book: A Beautiful Anatomy of Loss, Illustrated by Quentin Blake

Apr 3·1 min read·13 words

The Wild Iris: Nobel Laureate Louise Glück on the Door at the End of Your Suffering

Apr 2·1 min read·16 words

Do Not Spare Yourself

Apr 2·1 min read·4 words

The Courage of Vulnerability: Teenage Frida Kahlo’s Moving Letters to Her First Love

Apr 1·1 min read·13 words

Why Are We Not Better Than We Are: How Poetry Saves Lives

Apr 1·1 min read·12 words

The Three Elements of the Good Life

Apr 1·1 min read·7 words

The Intelligence of Emotions: Philosopher Martha Nussbaum on How Storytelling Rewires Us and Why Befriending Our Neediness Is Essential for Happiness

Mar 31·1 min read·21 words

The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

Mar 31·1 min read·10 words

How Flamingos Got Their Pink

Mar 31·1 min read·5 words

Nick Cave on Creative Work as an Instrument of Self-Forgiveness and the Courage of Hope in Cynical Times

Mar 30·1 min read·18 words

A Stoic’s Key to Peace of Mind: Seneca on the Antidote to Anxiety

Mar 30·1 min read·13 words

Ursula K. Le Guin on Suffering and Getting to the Other Side of Pain

Mar 29·1 min read·14 words

Gardening and the Creative Spirit: 200 Years of Great Writers and Artists on the Rewards of Soil and Seed

Mar 29·1 min read·19 words

The Courage to Be Yourself: Virginia Woolf on How to Hear Your Soul

Mar 28·1 min read·13 words

Emerson on Talent vs. Character, Our Resistance to Change, and the Key to True Personal Growth

Mar 28·1 min read·16 words

How Do You Know That You Love Somebody? Philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s Incompleteness Theorem of the Heart’s Truth, from Plato to Proust

Mar 28·1 min read·21 words

Corrective for a Broken Heart

Mar 27·1 min read·5 words

The Most Important Thing to Remember About Your Mother

Mar 27·1 min read·9 words

The Bird in the Heart: Terry Tempest Williams on the Paradox of Transformation and How to Live with Uncertainty

Mar 27·1 min read·19 words

How to Stop Waiting and Start Living: A Jolt from Henry James

Mar 26·1 min read·12 words

Gardening as Resistance: Notes on Building Paradise

Mar 25·1 min read·7 words

How to Stop Doing and Start Living

Mar 25·1 min read·7 words

Telling Is Listening: Ursula K. Le Guin on the Magic of Real Human Conversation

Mar 25·1 min read·14 words

Bruce Springsteen on Surviving Depression and His Strategy for Living Through the Visitations of the Darkness

Mar 24·1 min read·16 words

Create Dangerously: Albert Camus on the Power of Art as Resistance and Creativity as an Instrument of Freedom

Mar 24·1 min read·18 words

The Invention of Zero: How Ancient Mesopotamia Created the Mathematical Concept of Nought and Ancient India Gave It Symbolic Form

Mar 24·1 min read·20 words

Something Deeper Than Hope: Terry Tempest Williams on Our Stays Against Despair

Mar 23·1 min read·12 words

Life, Loss, and the Wisdom of Rivers

Mar 23·1 min read·7 words

The Music of Trees: Improvisation, Iteration, and the Science of Immortality

Mar 22·1 min read·11 words

Place, Personhood, and the Hippocampus: The Fascinating Science of Magnetism, Autonoeic Consciousness, and What Makes Us Who We Are

Mar 22·1 min read·19 words

The Art of Solitude: Buddhist Scholar and Teacher Stephen Batchelor on Contemplative Practice and Creativity

Mar 21·1 min read·15 words

This Is a Poem That Heals Fish: An Almost Unbearably Wonderful Picture-Book About How Poetry Works Its Magic

Mar 21·1 min read·18 words

When Your Parents Are Dying: Some of the Simplest, Most Difficult and Redemptive Life-Advice You’ll Ever Receive

Mar 21·1 min read·17 words

Music, the Neural Harmonics of Emotion, and How Love Recomposes the Brain

Mar 20·1 min read·12 words

Where Love Goes When It Goes

Mar 20·1 min read·6 words

Reweaving the Rainbow: Divinations for Living from the Science of Life

Mar 19·1 min read·11 words

Do the Next Right Thing: Carl Jung on How to Live and the Origin of His Famous Tenet for Navigating Uncertainty

Mar 19·1 min read·21 words

What Forgiveness Takes

Mar 19·1 min read·3 words

The Four Desires Driving All Human Behavior: Bertrand Russell’s Magnificent Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech

Mar 18·1 min read·14 words

How Two Souls Can Interact with One Another: Simone de Beauvoir on Love and Friendship

Mar 18·1 min read·15 words

The Measure of a Life Well Lived: Henry Miller on How to Grow Old and the Secret of Remaining Young at Heart

Mar 18·1 min read·22 words

How to Get Love Less Wrong: George Saunders on Breaking the Patterns that Break Our Hearts

Mar 17·1 min read·16 words

Marcus Aurelius on the Good Luck of Your Bad Luck: The Stoic Strategy for Weathering Life’s Waves and Turning Suffering into Strength

Mar 17·1 min read·22 words

How to Be a Lichen: Adaptive Strategies for the Vulnerabilities of Being Human from Nature’s Tiny Titans of Tenacity

Mar 16·1 min read·19 words

How to Bear Your Loneliness

Mar 16·1 min read·5 words

Roots and the Meaning of Life

Mar 16·1 min read·6 words

The Continuous Creative Act of Holding on and Letting Go: 10 Beautiful Minds on the Art of Growing Older

Mar 15·1 min read·19 words

How to Save a Life: “Little Prince” Author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry on the Power of the Smallest Kindnesses

Mar 15·1 min read·18 words

Pi and the Seductions of Infinity

Mar 14·1 min read·6 words

Einstein on Free Will and the Power of the Imagination

Mar 14·1 min read·10 words

When Things Fall Apart: Tibetan Buddhist Nun and Teacher Pema Chödrön on Transformation Through Difficult Times

Mar 13·1 min read·16 words

May Sarton on the Art of Living Alone

Mar 13·1 min read·8 words

User-Friendly Self-Deception: Philosopher Amélie Rorty on the Value of Our Delusions and the Antidote to the Self-Defeating Ones

Mar 13·1 min read·18 words

How to Feel Whole in a Broken World: An Astronaut’s Antidote to Despair

Mar 13·1 min read·13 words

Barry Lopez on the Cure for Our Existential Loneliness and the Three Tenets of a Full Life

Mar 13·1 min read·17 words

What Birds Dream About: How Evolution Invented REM in the Avian Brain So We May Practice the Possible in Our Sleep

Mar 12·1 min read·21 words

How Patterns Change

Mar 11·1 min read·3 words

Necessary Losses: The Life-Shaping Art of Letting Go

Mar 11·1 min read·8 words

Trauma, Transformation, and the Courage of Uncertainty: Prentis Hemphill on the Key to Breaking Our Patterns

Mar 11·1 min read·16 words

The Other Significant Others: Living and Loving Outside the Confines of Conventional Friendship and Compulsory Coupledom

Mar 10·1 min read·16 words

An Introvert’s Field Guide to Friendship: Thoreau on the Challenges and Rewards of Candid Connection

Mar 10·1 min read·15 words

Finding Sanity in Sprezzatura: The Lost 16th-century Italian Art of Living with Fluency, Serenity, and Openness to Wonder

Mar 10·1 min read·18 words

Bloom: A Touching Animated Short Film about Depression and What It Takes to Recover the Light of Being

Mar 9·1 min read·18 words

How Do We Know What We Want: Milan Kundera on the Central Ambivalences of Life and Love

Mar 9·1 min read·17 words

The Day Dostoyevsky Discovered the Meaning of Life in a Dream

Mar 9·1 min read·11 words

How to Love the World More: George Saunders on the Courage of Uncertainty

Mar 8·1 min read·13 words

How to Be a Stone: Three Poems for Trusting Time

Mar 8·1 min read·10 words

The Eternal Return: Nietzsche’s Brilliant Thought Experiment Illustrating the Key to Existential Contentment

Mar 8·1 min read·13 words

What Makes a Soul Mate: Roxane Gay on Loving vs. Being in Love

Mar 8·1 min read·13 words

How the Bicycle Was Born: Mount Tambora, the Year Without a Summer, and the Stubborn Courage to Reimagine the Possible

Mar 8·1 min read·20 words

An Irishwoman’s Fierce and Poetic Record of Traversing the World on a Bicycle in the Middle of the Cold War

Mar 8·1 min read·20 words

Annie Dillard on Unselfconsciousness

Mar 7·1 min read·4 words

Wander: Natascha McElhone Reads Hermann Hesse’s 100-Year-Old Love Letter to the Wisdom of Trees in a Cinematic Walk Through Kew Gardens

Mar 7·1 min read·21 words

Letting in the Golden Light: Oliver Sacks on How Love Changes What We See

Mar 7·1 min read·14 words

Doris Lessing on How to Read a Book and How to Read the World

Mar 6·1 min read·14 words

Virginia Woolf on Love

Mar 6·1 min read·4 words

Octavia Butler on Change and the Meaning of God

Mar 6·1 min read·9 words

But We Had Music

Mar 6·1 min read·4 words

How to Be a Tree: Notes on the Resilience of Letting Go

Mar 5·1 min read·12 words

What Happens When We Die

Mar 5·1 min read·5 words

Oliver Sacks on the Three Essential Elements of Creativity

Mar 5·1 min read·9 words

Albert Camus on the Source of Strength and How to Save Our Sanity in Trying Times

Mar 5·1 min read·16 words

The Paradox of Knowing Who You Are and What You Want: Cristina Campo on Fairy Tales, Time, and the Meaning of Maturity

Mar 4·1 min read·22 words

What a Weasel Knows That We Forget: Annie Dillard on How to Live

Mar 4·1 min read·13 words

The Pain in You and the God in You: Carl Jung on the Relationship Between Psychological Suffering and Creativity

Mar 4·1 min read·19 words

Pablo Neruda on How to Hold Time

Mar 3·1 min read·7 words

Escaping the Trap of Efficiency: The Counterintuitive Antidote to the Time-Anxiety That Haunts and Hampers Our Search for Meaning

Mar 3·1 min read·19 words

Borges on How to Conquer Time

Mar 2·1 min read·6 words

An Love, Reason, and the Antidote to the Melancholy of the Chance Not Taken

Mar 2·1 min read·14 words

The New Science of Plant Intelligence and the Mystery of What Makes a Mind

Mar 2·1 min read·14 words

Grace Paley on the Art of Growing Older

Mar 2·1 min read·8 words

How Should You Live Your Life: Marie Howe’s Spare, Stunning Poem “The Maples”

Mar 1·1 min read·13 words

A Lighthouse for Dark Times

Mar 1·1 min read·5 words

Against Self-Criticism: Adam Phillips on How Our Internal Critics Enslave Us, the Stockholm Syndrome of the Superego, and the Power of Multiple Interpretations

Mar 1·1 min read·23 words

Don’t Heed the Haters: Albert Einstein’s Wonderful Letter of Support to Marie Curie in the Midst of Scandal

Feb 28·1 min read·18 words

Trauma, Growth, and How to Be Twice as Alive: Tove Jansson on the Worm and the Art of Self-Renewal

Feb 28·1 min read·19 words

The Birth of Photography and the Death of Letters: Virginia Woolf on the Fate of Every Technology

Feb 28·1 min read·17 words

Fanny Wright and the Radical Courage of Being Real: The Forgotten Woman Who Pioneered Scientific Thinking and Free Love in America

Feb 27·1 min read·21 words

The Vampire Problem: The Paradoxical Psychology of Why It Is So Hard to Change

Feb 27·1 min read·14 words

The Courage to Be Yourself: E.E. Cummings on Art, Life, and Being Unafraid to Feel

Feb 27·1 min read·15 words

How to Live a Miraculous Life: Brian Doyle on Love, Humility, and the Quiet Grace of the Possible

Feb 26·1 min read·18 words

What It Takes to Grow: Pioneering Psychoanalyst Karen Horney on the Key to Self-Realization

Feb 26·1 min read·14 words

How to Get Over Someone: A Strategy for Coping with Heartbreak Based on the Evolutionary History of Hiccups

Feb 26·1 min read·18 words

Is There a God? Stephen Hawking Gives the Definitive Answer to the Eternal Question

Feb 26·1 min read·14 words

Do the Next Right Thing: Carl Jung on How to Live and the Origin of His Famous Tenet for Navigating Uncertainty

Feb 25·1 min read·21 words

The Third Self: Mary Oliver on Creativity and Time

Feb 25·1 min read·9 words

Wait: Galway Kinnell’s Beautiful and Life-Giving Poem for a Young Friend Contemplating Suicide

Feb 25·1 min read·13 words

The Gentle Giant: Oliver Sacks and the Art of Choosing Empathy Over Vengeance

Feb 25·1 min read·13 words

Music and the Body: Richard Powers on the Power of Song

Feb 24·1 min read·11 words

A Cosmic Pastoral: Diane Ackerman on the Intimate in the Infinite and the Responsibility of Rapture

Feb 24·1 min read·16 words

The Parts We Live With: D.H. Lawrence and the Yearning for Living Unison

Feb 24·1 min read·13 words

Moonlight and the Magic of the Unnecessary

Feb 24·1 min read·7 words

How to Grow Old: Bertrand Russell on What Makes a Fulfilling Life

Feb 24·1 min read·12 words

Tim Ferriss on How He Survived Suicidal Depression and His Tools for Warding Off the Darkness

Feb 24·1 min read·16 words

Orcas and the Price of Consciousness: Lessons in Love and Loss from Earth’s Most Successful and Creative Predator

Feb 23·1 min read·18 words

The Seamstress Who Solved the Ancient Mystery of the Argonaut, Pioneered the Aquarium, and Laid the Groundwork for the Study of Octopus Intelligence

Feb 23·1 min read·23 words

James Baldwin on How to Live Through Your Darkest Hour and Life as a Moral Obligation to the Universe

Feb 23·1 min read·19 words

Dostoyevsky on Why There Are No Bad People

Feb 23·1 min read·8 words

The Mattering Instinct

Feb 22·1 min read·3 words

Emily Dickinson’s Electric Love Letters to Susan Gilbert

Feb 22·1 min read·8 words

Arundhati Roy on the Deepest Measure of Success

Feb 22·1 min read·8 words

The Three Elements of the Good Life

Feb 22·1 min read·7 words

Pioneering Psychiatrist Donald Winnicott on the Qualities of a Healthy Mind and a Healthy Relationship

Feb 21·1 min read·15 words

How to Stop Waiting and Start Living: A Jolt from Henry James

Feb 21·1 min read·12 words

Seneca on Grief and the Key to Resilience in the Face of Loss: An Extraordinary Letter to His Mother

Feb 21·1 min read·19 words

How Do You Know That You Love Somebody? Philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s Incompleteness Theorem of the Heart’s Truth, from Plato to Proust

Feb 20·1 min read·21 words

From the Labor Camp to the Literary Canon: How Dostoyevsky Became a Writer

Feb 20·1 min read·13 words

Walt Whitman’s Advice on Living a Vibrant and Rewarding Life

Feb 20·1 min read·10 words

The Color of Wonder and the Chemical Code of Creation

Feb 19·1 min read·10 words

How the Great Zen Master and Peace Activist Thich Nhat Hanh Found Himself and Lost His Self in a Library Epiphany

Feb 19·1 min read·21 words

The Courage to Be Yourself: Virginia Woolf on How to Hear Your Soul

Feb 19·1 min read·13 words

How to Be More Alive: Hermann Hesse on Wonder and the Proper Aim of Education

Feb 19·1 min read·15 words

The Importance of Breakdowns: Crisis as a Clarifying Force for Authenticity

Feb 19·1 min read·11 words

How to Shed the Surface-Self: The Forgotten Visionary Evelyn Underhill on Touching the Depths of Being

Feb 18·1 min read·16 words

Love After Life: Nobel-Winning Physicist Richard Feynman’s Extraordinary Letter to His Departed Wife

Feb 18·1 min read·13 words

Hermann Hesse on Solitude, the Value of Hardship, the Courage to Be Yourself, and How to Find Your Destiny

Feb 18·1 min read·19 words

Storytelling and the Art of Tenderness: Olga Tokarczuk’s Magnificent Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech

Feb 17·1 min read·13 words

Mary Oliver on What Attention Really Means and Her Moving Elegy for Her Soul Mate

Feb 17·1 min read·15 words

For Warmth: Thich Nhat Hanh’s Poetic Antidote to Anger

Feb 17·1 min read·9 words

Keith Haring on Creativity, Self-Doubt, and the Love of Life in the Face of Death

Feb 16·1 min read·15 words

Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower: Rilke’s Timeless Spell for Living Through Difficult Times

Feb 16·1 min read·15 words

How to Live and How to Die

Feb 16·1 min read·7 words

Kafka’s Approach to Creative Block and the Four Psychological Hindrances That Keep the Gifted from Living Up to Their Gifts

Feb 15·1 min read·20 words

How We Render Reality: Attention as an Instrument of Love

Feb 15·1 min read·10 words

How Not to Waste Your Life

Feb 15·1 min read·6 words

Be Like Water: The Philosophy and Origin of Bruce Lee’s Famous Metaphor for Resilience

Feb 15·1 min read·14 words

Richard Dawkins on the Luckiness of Death

Feb 15·1 min read·7 words

Undoing as Remaking: How Abraham Lincoln Drew Poetry and Power from His Suicidal Depression

Feb 14·1 min read·14 words

Love Anyway

Feb 14·1 min read·2 words

Albert Camus on the Will to Live and the Most Important Question of Existence

Feb 14·1 min read·14 words

Hannah Arendt on Love and How to Live with the Fundamental Fear of Loss

Feb 14·1 min read·14 words

The Monarchs, Music, and the Meaning of Life: The Most Touching Deathbed Love Letter Ever Written

Feb 13·1 min read·16 words

How to Keep Life from Becoming a Parody of Itself: Simone de Beauvoir on the Art of Growing Older

Feb 13·1 min read·19 words

How to Grow Up: Nick Cave’s Life-Advice to a 13-Year-Old

Feb 13·1 min read·10 words

The Art of Choosing Love Over Not-Love: Rumi’s Antidote to Our Human Tragedy

Feb 12·1 min read·13 words

Bruce Springsteen on Surviving Depression and His Strategy for Living Through the Visitations of the Darkness

Feb 12·1 min read·16 words

Notes on Complexity: A Buddhist Scientist on the Murmuration of Being

Feb 12·1 min read·11 words

Why You

Feb 11·1 min read·2 words

Darwin’s Greatest Regret and His Deathbed Reflection on What Makes Life Worth Living

Feb 11·1 min read·13 words

The Art of Solitude: Buddhist Scholar and Teacher Stephen Batchelor on Contemplative Practice and Creativity

Feb 11·1 min read·15 words

Edward Abbey on How to Live and How to Die

Feb 11·1 min read·10 words

Dostoyevsky, Just After His Death Sentence Was Repealed, on the Meaning of Life

Feb 11·1 min read·13 words

Blaise Pascal on the Intuitive vs. the Logical Mind and How We Come to Know Truth

Feb 11·1 min read·16 words

Virginia Woolf on Self-Knowledge and the Limits of Empathy

Feb 10·1 min read·9 words

The Great Blue Heron, Signs vs. Omens, and Our Search for Meaning

Feb 10·1 min read·12 words

How We Grieve: Meghan O’Rourke on the Messiness of Mourning and Learning to Live with Loss

Feb 10·1 min read·16 words

Fernando Pessoa on Unselfing into Who You Really Are

Feb 10·1 min read·9 words

Albert Camus on the Three Antidotes to the Absurdity of Life

Feb 9·1 min read·11 words

Hermann Hesse on Discovering the Soul Beneath the Self and the Key to Finding Peace

Feb 9·1 min read·15 words

The Blessing of Burnout: Samin Nosrat on the Faustian Bargain of Achievement and the Simple Substance of the Good Life

Feb 8·1 min read·20 words

Polyvagal Theory and the Neurobiology of Connection: The Science of Rupture, Repair, and Reciprocity

Feb 8·1 min read·14 words

Leonard Cohen on the Antidote to Anger and the Meaning of Resistance

Feb 7·1 min read·12 words

Relationship Rupture and the Limbic System: The Physiology of Abandonment and Separation

Feb 7·1 min read·12 words

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

Feb 7·1 min read·23 words

Oliver Sacks on Despair and the Meaning of Life

Feb 6·1 min read·9 words

The Story Behind Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” and the Poet’s Own Stirring Reading of His Masterpiece

Feb 6·1 min read·22 words

Dying Mothers, the Birth of Handwashing, and the Bittersweet True Love Story Behind ‘Frankenstein’

Feb 6·1 min read·14 words

Yes to Life, in Spite of Everything: Viktor Frankl’s Lost Lectures on Moving Beyond Optimism and Pessimism to Find the Deepest Source of Meaning

Feb 6·1 min read·24 words

The Reason of Emotion: Bruce Lee’s Unpublished Writings on Willpower, Imagination, and Confidence

Feb 6·1 min read·13 words

Kandinsky on the Spiritual Element in Art and the Three Responsibilities of Artists

Feb 5·1 min read·13 words

How Pioneering Physicist Lise Meitner Discovered Nuclear Fission, Paved the Way for Women in Science, and Was Denied the Nobel Prize

Feb 5·1 min read·21 words

Sleep and the Meaning of Life: Fernando Pessoa on the Existential Dimension of the Horizontal Hours

Feb 4·1 min read·16 words

Carl Jung on Creativity

Feb 4·1 min read·4 words