Clik here to view.
NostradamusGPT: The Psychology of Prophecy and How to Break Free from the...
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...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Probability Theory Pioneer Mark Kac on the Unpredictability of Creativity and...
“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 is...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing on Breaking Free from the Prisons We Choose to...
This is the history of the world: revolutionaries turning into tyrants, leaders who claim to stand with the masses turning the individuals within them on each other, stirring certainties and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Hermann Hesse on How to Read a Book and How to Read Yourself
Books show us what it is like to be another and at the same time return us to ourselves. We read to learn how to live — how to love and how to suffer, how to grieve and how to be glad. We read to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
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...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Madman Who Saved Mothers: The Invention of Handwashing and the...
This essay is adapted from Traversal. “Death may snatch me from you, before you can weigh my advice,” Mary Wollstonecraft wrote in the philosophical novel she wouldn’t live to finish, addressing a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Elizabeth Gilbert on Love, Loss, and How to Move Through Grief as Grief Moves...
“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,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
How to Say “YES” to 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 its...
View ArticleClik here to view.
C.S. Lewis on How to Structure the Days of a Creative Life and Train the...
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. Wonder,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
How to Handle a Narcissistic and Abusive Parent: Kafka’s Remarkable Letter to...
“It is, after all, not necessary to fly right into the middle of the sun, but it is necessary to crawl to a clean little spot on earth where the sun sometimes shines and one can warm oneself a little.”...
View ArticleClik here to view.
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 we...
View ArticleClik here to view.
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 tells us...
View ArticleClik here to view.
How to Doubt Your Way into a Truer Life
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 possibility...
View ArticleClik here to view.
How Memory Makes Us and Breaks Truth: The Rashomon Effect and the Science of...
“We are our memory… that chimerical museum of shifting shapes, that pile of broken mirrors.” It is already disorienting enough to accept that our attention only absorbs a fraction of the events and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Sleeping Beauties: David Byrne on Why Transformative Ideas Fall Dormant and...
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...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Improvisation and the Quantum of Consciousness
Inside the brain’s secret portal to remembering the future. Few things in life are more vivifying than a shimmering reminder that we can still surprise ourselves — those rare moments when the urn of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
How to Remake Yourself When You Are Undone: Lincoln and the Gift of His...
Life-affirming inspiration from a man who knew intimately “that intensity of thought, which will some times wear the sweetest idea thread-bare and turn it to the bitterness of death.” “I am now the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Vincent van Gogh on Fear, Taking Risks, and How Inspired Mistakes Propel Us...
“However meaningless and vain, however dead life appears, the man of faith, of energy, of warmth… steps in and does something.” During our recent conversation at the Boston Book Festival, the wise and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Walt Whitman, Shortly After His Paralytic Stroke, on What Makes Life Worth...
“Tone your wants and tastes low down enough, and make much of negatives, and of mere daylight and the skies.” “Do you need a prod?” the poet Mary Oliver asked in her sublime meditation on living with...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Inner Space, Outer Space, and How to Be an Astronaut in the Cosmos of...
“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.” We move among surfaces. If we are lucky...
View Article
