Marginalia on our search for meaning.
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How We Become Ourselves: Erik Erikson’s 8 Stages of Human Development

It never ceases to stagger that some stroke of chance in the early history of the universe set into motion the Rube Goldberg machine of events that turned atoms born in the first stars into you — into this temporary clump of borrowed stardust that, for the brief interlude between not having existed and no longer existing, gets to have ideas and ice...

Sat Sep 28, 2024 15:14
How to Triumph Over the Challenges of the Creative Life: Audubon’s Antidote to Despair

We move through the world as surfaces shimmering with the visibilia of our accomplishments, the undertow of our suffering invisible to passers-by. The selective collective memory we call history contributes to this willful blindness, obscuring the tremendous personal cost behind some of humanity’s most triumphant achievements — the great discoveries,...

Wed Sep 25, 2024 19:14
Curiosity as an Instrument of Love: Thoreau and the Little Owl

“If you would learn the secrets of Nature, you must practice more humanity than others.” Among the things I most cherish about science is the way it anneals curiosity. True curiosity is an open wonderment at what something is and how it works without emotional attachment to the outcome of observation and experiment. It is only when we cede emotional...

Tue Sep 24, 2024 00:00
Winnicott on the Psychology of Democracy, the Most Dangerous Type of Person, and the Unconscious Root of Resisting Women Leaders

In the late morning of the first day of August in 2023, exactly twenty summers after I arrived in Philadelphia as a lone teenager from a country thirteen centuries America’s senior, I experienced that wonderful capacity for self-surprise as tears came streaming down my face in a windowless government office. I had taken the naturalization ceremony to...

Mon Sep 23, 2024 00:03
From Stars to Souls: The Science of What Made You You, with a Dazzling Poem Read by David Byrne

“Look at the clever things we have made out of a few building blocks — O fabulous continuum.” We are each a chance constellation of elements forged in long-dead stars assembled by gravity, which may be the other word for God — the weakest of the four fundamental forces, yet the great cosmic compactor that made the first atoms cohere into a common...

Thu Sep 19, 2024 23:16
The Consolations of Chronodiversity: Geologist Turned Psychologist Ruth Allen on the 12 Kinds of Time and How to Be More Fully Alive

“I prefer the time of insects to the time of stars,” Nobel laureate Wisława Szymborska wrote in her lovely poem “Possibilities.” Our preferences, of course, hardly matter to time — we live here suspended between the time of insects and the time of stars, our transient lives bookended by not yet and never again. Time baffles us with its elasticity, the...

Wed Sep 18, 2024 22:16

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