Who Gets to Define Beauty?
Why are appearance compliments so hard to believe? The answer lies in body image, personal history, and the beauty standards we’ve learned to trust.
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Honoring Who You Are While Growing
The dynamic of personal growth often shows up as “I don’t need any” or “I better change because I’m not enough now.” You can have both—your essential worth and your growth.
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Why Due Dates Motivate Progress and How to Benefit From Them
An unfinished quilt became the inspiration for a simple framework that can help you finally complete the creative projects that have been haunting you.
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The gap is not glorious
The Buddha’s encounter with unwelcome facts of life. Picture from Wat Preah Prom Rath, Siem Reap, Cambodia: Adobe Stock image copyright by Godong Photo. The great Buddhist poet Aśvaghoṣa famously tells the story of the Buddha’s father, the king, who tried to keep his son as an heir rather than a monk by isolating him…
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Social Media and Social Networking for Social Scientists
Social scientists are trained to avoid traditional social media, but many belong to LinkedIn. Users should take care not to overstate their findings, which erodes public trust.
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Building Resilience through Environmental Volunteering
Discover how volunteering for the environment can restore connection and meaning, especially after trauma, moral injury, and loss.
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How to Stop Waiting and Start Living: A Jolt from Henry James
“It wouldn’t have been failure to be bankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything.” “The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation,” Rebecca Solnit wrote in her exquisite Field Guide to Getting Lost. The wanting…
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Kahlil Gibran on the Art of Becoming Yourself Across the Sweep of Life
A roadmap to the fulfilled belonging on the other side of “the great aloneness which knows not what is far and what is near, nor what is small nor great.” The unfolding of life does more than fray our bodies with entropy — it softens our spirit, blunting the edge of vanity and broadening the…
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Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde, and Ms. Boodle: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Advice on Writing to a Young Woman Aspiring to Be an Author
In late 1884, Adelaide Boodle — talented, timorous, still in her twenties — received news so thrilling she thought she was dreaming: Her favorite author was moving into the small town on the south coast of England that had always been her home. Having longed to be a writer since childhood, she seized the chance…
