Understanding Why We Procrastinate
What underlies your procrastination? Understanding it may be the key to finally letting it go.
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The Fattening
While the exact figures vary from study to study and estimate to estimate, about 30% of adult Americans are only overweight and about 43% are obese. Obesity is also a problem worldwide, but obviously not in places where there are food shortages. There is the question of why the United States faces this problem while…
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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 considered in isolation.” When the first European colonists made landfall on New Zealand’s shores in Humboldt’s lifetime, the cats and rats…
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The Loveliness of Letting Go: An Illustrated Ode to Life’s Lasts
The great cruelty of life, and also its great mercy, is that only hindsight ever knows each last — the last time your lover put their hand on the small of your back, the last sip of the last cup at your favorite coffee shop before it vanished overnight, the last living note of your…
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How to Be Un-Dead: Notes on Waking Up from the Trance of Near-Living
“Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.” “When you surrender, the problem ceases to exist,” Henry Miller wrote in his stunning letter to Anaïs Nin (February…
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The Other Significant Others: Living and Loving Outside the Confines of Conventional Friendship and Compulsory Coupledom
“While we weaken friendships by expecting too little of them, we undermine romantic relationships by expecting too much of them.” We move through the world largely unaware that our emotions are made of concepts — the brain’s coping mechanism for the blooming buzzing confusion of what we are. We label, we classify, we contain —…
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The More Loving One: The Science of Entropy and the Art of Alternative Endings
“If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me.” This essay and poem are now part of the Universe in Verse book. In 1865 — a year before the German marine biologist Ernst Haeckel coined the word ecology, the year Emily Dickinson composed her stunning pre-ecological poem about how life-forms come into…
