Life and Letters The scientist was famous for linking healing with storytelling. Sometimes that meant reshaping patients’ reality. December 8, 2025 Sacks, a celebrated neurologist, avoided love for nearly fifty years, displacing his psychic conflicts onto the lives of his patients.Photograph by…

The Woman in the Moon, from the first British edition of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley, 1894. When one is born, one is fundamentally born separate. This is very unfortunate, however it is also, inevitably, a fact of life. We come into the world as infants who, around the time…

In the hands of a great performer, the classical guitar can mesmerise audiences with its beauty, emotional power and subtlety. The 20th century was dominated by the Spanish guitar legend Andrés Segovia, who took the instrument from the salon to the large concert halls of the world, aided in part by…

Reminder: Register for our next edition of TRB Live, our interactive conversation series where we dig into the mechanics of running sustainable media businesses. Next Wednesday, Nov.19, from 1pm-2pmET, Hearst Newspapers senior director of new content initiatives Alex Ptachick and Subtext CEO Mike…

At Aboard , we’re building a tool that helps you build business software very, very quickly. And lately we’re starting to have more meetings to pitch our approach—and I've been using AI to prep myself for those meetings. When I used to work at an agency, it was always hard to prep for meetings like…

Letter of recommendation Learning is painful, pleasant and, above all, communal. Listen to this article · 5:26 min Learn more Credit...Illustration by David Huang By Nov. 18, 2025, 5:01 a.m. ET Late last spring I went through a period of some personal troubles and felt I was in need of spiritual…

I stole this idea and now use it with every single employee. It’s the best illustration I’ve seen of teaching someone to be high agency. It says there are 5 levels of work: Level 1: “There is a problem.” Level 2: “There is a problem, and I’ve found some causes.” Level 3: “Here’s the problem, here…

Badlands National Park in South Dakota.Credit...Gregory Halpern/Magnum, for The New York Times A trip to the Badlands with my 8-year old offered lessons in boyhood — and manhood. Badlands National Park in South Dakota.Credit...Gregory Halpern/Magnum, for The New York Times By Sam Graham-Felsen is a…

The New Age author was drawn to an esoteric bible in the 1970s. It made her a self-help megastar. And now it has gone mainstream. Supporters of Marianne Williamson at a watch party of the Democratic debates, hosted by Sylvia Snow (left) and Shane Snow.Credit...Holly Pickett for The New York Times By…

Collages by Vartika Sharma. Source image © Judith Collins/Alamy Last spring, I flew across the continent to California and drove into the beautiful hills of Mill Valley to visit the independent publisher of A Course in Miracles. I wanted to learn more about this book, one of the strangest I had ever…

Severin Matusek, Nick Houde and Paloma Moniz Building the culture we want requires a radical change in mindset, and action. The dream of a free and open Internet isn't dead—but in 2025, it's definitely more complicated. Published Oct. 15, 2025 Share this! We used to talk about the next era of the…

Gen Z does not have a great reputation. That’s not necessarily their fault, but it definitely doesn’t help that they’ve come of age during such a tumultuous moment in human history. With the world reeling from political and social strife, looming environmental catastrophe, seemingly endless wars,…

You’ve been in therapy for years—so why do you still feel anxious all the time? Maybe it’s because you’ve been targeting the wrong bottlenecks. Interpersonal anxiety is a learned behavior. As such, it can be unlearned. Instead of acquiring new coping mechanisms, you can remove the underlying…

A few weeks back, my colleague, Andrew, dropped a line I haven’t stopped thinking about: “Too much learning without an outlet to apply it can lead to overload.” I’ve been turning that over in my head ever since. Mostly because I recognize myself in it. I am a world‑class content hoarder. I’ll…

a book about love and literature

‘I’m going to throw that thing into a river!” my wife says as she comes down the stairs looking frazzled after putting our four-year-old daughter to bed. To be clear, “that thing” is not our daughter, Emma*. It’s Grem, an AI-powered stuffed alien toy that the musician Claire Boucher, better known as…

Credit: KITH Erewhon, the cult-favorite upscale Los Angeles grocery chain, is coming to New York City. But the market, known for celebrity-endorsed smoothies and $30 ice cubes, will be harder to access than the West Coast locations. As first spotted by Emily Sundberg’s Feed Me newsletter, Erewhon…

Where does mind stop and world begin? Not at skull and skin, that’s for sure. Life is as much undergone as done. We are constitutionally in the midst. —Robert MacFarlane, Is A River Alive? Robert Macfarlane’s Is A River Alive? asks what would it mean for our understanding of the natural world and…

Last week, I had coffee with someone who works at a big consulting firm. She spent twenty minutes explaining her role to me. Not because it was complex, but because she was trying to convince herself it existed. "I facilitate stakeholder alignment across cross-functional workstreams," she said. Then…

Annals of Fashion The brand conceives of itself as a distribution system for utopian values as much as a clothing company. Can it become the world’s biggest clothing manufacturer? September 15, 2025 Uniqlo, founded in Japan in 1984, is the universal donor of fashion, intended to go with any…

Being good isn’t enough 06 Sep, 2025 Giving good career advice is hard. Maybe it’s because careers can look more alike than they really are. Two people can have the same title but what helps one could be rubbish for another. Or maybe it’s that “good advice” itself is fuzzy. It depends entirely on…

As children, we think things just exist. Buildings, parks, institutions. They’re just there, like mountains or rivers. Part of the landscape. Then we grow up and realize that, oh, someone built that. But that realization doesn’t do it justice. We equate “someone built that” with “someone made…

Ibiza coast. August 2025. I went through a phase where I Anki’d every useful-seeming Japanese word I came across as well as all of the standard 2,136 kanji. I was teaching English in Japan at the time, which meant I was thinking about language learning all day. I’d arrived with no knowledge of the…

1. Meditation is easy! Just patiently relax the invisible eyeball with infinite pupils in the center of your brain until is-ness softens. 2. Hum until your whole head is buzzing, then relax and let the tingles settle at the bottom of your feet like you are a snow globe. 3. Many animals use hair to…

Jacques-Louis David (francês, 1748–1825). Madame François Buron, 1769. Óleo sobre tela, 66.3 × 55.5 cm. Instituto de Arte de Chicago. Tati Bernardi comprou um martelo — e se ressente de situações que exigem qualquer outra ferramenta. A Boba da Corte, seu livro mais recente, é uma tentativa de…

Critic’s Notebook The artist’s latest album, “The Passionate Ones,” catches your weariness, and, with a dreamer’s irrationality, asks if you would consider transforming it, even for a while. August 30, 2025 Photograph by Hannah Murrell You’re reading Critic’s Notebook, our weekend column looking at…

‘I can’t explain it. He is a sweetheart. A beautiful boy inside and out, and so brilliant.” This was how a session with N, a longtime patient of mine, began some years ago. Her son, A, was a young teenager, and in spite of coming from a warm, loving family with attentive parents, he had started…

as someone who meets a lot of new people given my inclination to attend the opening of any envelope and as someone who dates quite a bit, i think a lot about what exactly makes a person interesting to me. this is obviously a very personal and malleable question, “interesting” is merely deemed by the…

I've been seeing this statement circulate online: "You have about 36 months to make it." And it makes sense: AI will continue to replace jobs no matter how much people fight against it. Money as we know it will change or even cease to exist because millions of ASIs (artificial superintelligences)…

It’d be easy to talk about the long awaited fourth collection from Ben Lerner as excellent, or sophisticated, and both would be true, however I am more inclined to think of The Lights as a vertex, a plot on a chart to a heavenly body that Ben Lerner’s next collection, or the next, might take us to.…

Nonfiction The celebrated journalist's brief final book, “Still Pictures,” may well be her most personal, assembling photographs and vignettes of her family, friends and childhood as an immigrant to America. Janet Malcolm, in an undated photograph. “The past is a country that issues no visas,” she…

Janet Malcolm in New York in 1989. George Lange Janet Malcolm b. 1934 She could be harsh in her judgments but wrote with a deep understanding of human frailty. In the tributes that followed the death of Janet Malcolm, a clear pattern emerged: a word-cloud of severity. Malcolm was described as…

Will Storr, author and fellow Substacker, recently wrote about his “midlife identity crisis”. I was struck, while reading it, at how rare it is for people - men in particular - to admit that growing older can be tough. In the second half of life, we’re all expected to say how much happier we are…

The private chef job was for the most high-end estate I’d ever set foot in. And believe me, I’d private-cheffed for A-list celebrities by then, so this place was next level. Like, we literally cleaned the counters with gloves, Windex, and the Holy Bible. Everything was hyper-specific. My outfit had…

“We can’t put a date on Doomsday, but by looking at the 5,000 years of [civilisation], we can understand the trajectories we face today – and self-termination is most likely,” says Dr Luke Kemp at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge. “I’m pessimistic about the…