Once, I spent a year walking Brooklyn’s historic Green-Wood Cemetery daily, winding between the marble tombs engulfed by tree-roots and emblazoned with the surnames of the dead, each followed by a full stop to demarcate the terminus of life. It hovers there, so sure of itself, this punctuational emblem of an irrevocable end. And yet…
“If I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week.” A century before an encyclopedia titled Natural Wonders Every Child Should Know fell into Alan Turing’s child-hands and seeded the ideas that bloomed into the computing revolution,…
A great paradox of being alive in this civilization is that we have come to dread and devalue the triumph of having lived, forgetting that to grow old is not a punishment but a privilege — that of having survived the loneliness of childhood, the brash insecurity of youth, the turmoil of middle age, in…
An earlier version of this article appeared April 13, 2020 According to my Four Tendencies framework, every person falls into one of four categories — Upholder, Obliger, Questioner, or Rebel — based on how they respond to expectations. This sounds like a fairly dry, boring fact about someone — but it turns out to be…
Personal Perspective: Some expressions of appreciation can leave us feeling unsettled.
AI is built to converge on the likely answer. But medicine needs to know what got crowded out along the way.
Why do so many of us hate pictures of ourselves? The answer often has less to do with the camera than the lens through which we’ve learned to see ourselves.
Do you ask yourself if you are accidentally doing things that keep you stuck in your anxiety? People sabotage their quest to overcome anxiety in many ways.
New research on how people decide suggests that indecision reveals less than you think about your hidden preferences.
