Sometimes events converge in my life and explode into revelation. A few weeks ago, I edited an interview with Elizabeth Spalding, one of the founders and now the director of the Victims of Communism Museum in Washington, D.C. About this same time, I read Under a Cruel Star, Heda Kovály’s account of life in Czechoslovakia
READ MORE
Cat Parker had to be her own health advocate before she could advocate for other people. Like others who’ve had an adverse reaction to the COVID-19 vaccine, she followed her gut and didn’t just push her symptoms under the generic rug of menopause like some of her doctors suggested. Cat, 50, of Plymouth, Minnesota, is
READ MORE
Earlier this year, nearly one-quarter of all Yale undergraduates enrolled in a course on how to be happy. “A lot of us are anxious, stressed, unhappy, numb,” a freshman taking the course told the New York Times. “The fact that a class like this has such large interest speaks to how tired students are of numbing
READ MORE
For better or worse, my brain is wired to doubt. Even when I’m feeling all gooey and spiritual and thinking that maybe there’s a prime mover in charge of things, my skeptical synapses swoop in and spoil the fun, insisting my thoughts are just a trick of human biology. But the pandemic—or rather, the pandemic response—has
READ MORE
“Somebody’s boring me,” poet Dylan Thomas once commented. “I think it’s me,” he added. Were you to become a fly on the wall, or in this age of electronic wonders, a tiny drone, you might observe my daily life and decide that I’m the most boring human on planet earth. I follow the same daily
READ MORE
A friend recently sent me a popular meme called the Pyramid of Intellect. It shows the various academic degrees, starting at the base of the pyramid with a high school diploma and narrows its way up to a Ph.D. But at the very top of the pyramid is a little section that reads, “People who
READ MORE
Most Read from past 7 days
Most Read from past 30 days
Most Read of All Time
Most Read of All Time
