“I just look at some things and go, ‘Why is that? Why does it work that way?’ Oftentimes, the people most entrenched in a system have no idea why.”— Nick Kokonas Nick Kokonas (IG: @nkokonas,…

Photo by Christopher Michel “The goal of meditation is to uncover a form of wellbeing that is inherent to the nature of our minds.” — Sam Harris Sam Harris (@SamHarrisOrg) received a degree in philosophy…

“The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both,” Carl Sagan wrote in his final book nearly four centuries after Galileo made the same point in his famous letter…

“All your sorrows have been wasted on you if you have not yet learned how to be wretched,” Seneca told his mother in his extraordinary letter on resilience in the face of loss. One need…

“The first sip is joy, the second is gladness, the third is serenity, the fourth is madness, the fifth is ecstasy,” Jack Kerouac wrote of tea in his 1958 novel The Dharma Bums. Late one…

We go through life seeing reality not as it really is, in its unfathomable depths of complexity and contradiction, but as we hope or fear or expect it to be. Too often, we confuse certainty…

In the early summer of 1816, weeks before her nineteenth birthday, Mary Shelley (August 30, 1797–February 1, 1851) — then still Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin — dreamt up Frankenstein on the shores of Lake Geneva in…

“Finding the words is another step in learning to see,” bryologist Robin Wall Kimmerer wrote in reflecting on what her Native American tradition and her training as a scientist taught her about how naming confers…