Articles about fiction and non-fiction books and how they can help us live a better life.
“A human being is a part of the whole, called by us ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space,” Albert Einstein wrote in a beautiful letter of consolation to a grieving father. “He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving … Read more
“We call spirituality a journey and speak in metaphors of travel, yet many of us never leave the neighborhood. The journal becomes the metaphor made real, a travelogue of the mind,” writes Christina Baldwin in the opening chapter of her book Life’s Companion: Journal Writing as a Spiritual Practice. “On days when I’m not sure what the … Read more
In 1969, Swiss-American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross identified the five stages of dying in her groundbreaking book On Death and Dying. Three decades later, in her final book On Grief and Grieving, co-authored with her friend David Kessler and published posthumously, Kubler-Ross adapted the stages she had observed in the dying to account for the similar … Read more
“Technology catalyzes changes not only in what we do but in how we think. It changes people’s awareness of themselves, of one another, of their relationship with the world,” writes Sherry Turkle in her book The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit. “The new machine that stands behind the flashing digital signal, unlike the … Read more