Thoughtful Perspectives on Modern Issues
Kaveh Akbar’s debut novel “Martyr!” is a meditation on what it means to die for something—and what it means to keep living when you’re not sure why you should. It’s a book about addiction, heritage, faith, and the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of suffering. And while it doesn’t always land its punches…
There’s a passage from Viktor Frankl that keeps returning to me these days, insistent as a knock on the door: “Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation.” I’ve been sitting with this thought—and with Frankl’s two slender books,…
Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now sells a seductive idea: your suffering exists because you live anywhere but here. The past is memory, the future is projection, and both are illusions manufactured by what Tolle calls the “ego”—the false self constructed from accumulated psychological time. Freedom, he argues, lies in collapsing into the present moment…
The Alaska National Guard helicopters cut through October skies, ferrying hundreds of evacuees from western Alaska villages to emergency shelters in Anchorage. Below them, the landscape told a story written in water and mud—homes submerged, communities fractured, ancestral ground rendered unrecognizable. Up to fifteen villages across the region now sit empty or uninhabitable, their residents…
We live in the age of meditation’s triumph. Mindfulness apps boast millions of subscribers. Corporate wellness programs offer lunchtime meditation sessions. Therapists prescribe contemplative practice alongside—or instead of—medication. The narrative is nearly universal: meditation heals, calms, clarifies. It is the antidote to our fractured, anxious age. But what happens when the cure creates its own…