This Is What Progress Looks Like

Last year, the writer Chuck Palahniuk received the kind of news that all of us dread. Someone he trusted—the book agent who had represented him for years—had been slowly but steadily robbing him blind...

12 Maalis 20193min

In his wonderful book, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, the Pulitzer Prize winning scholar Stephen Greenblatt spends a lot of time analyzing a pivotal moment early in the life of Saint Augustine, wh...

11 Maalis 20193min

One of Seneca’s most powerful strategies comes from his time as a Senator. Speaking again of a thought from Epicurus, with which he only partly agrees, Seneca explains that he is so readily able to dr...

8 Maalis 20194min

There is a beautiful passage on the last page of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s, The Little House in the Big Woods. She writes of an evening in the cabin with her family, her father playing the fiddle, her mo...

7 Maalis 20192min

Although today we consider “passion” to be a good thing—as in find your passion—to the Stoics, the passions were something to be wary of. Desire, rivalry, excitement, infatuation, anger. These were po...

6 Maalis 20194min

In 2017, Good Morning Britain anchor Susanna Reid presented her co-anchor (actually she calls him her TV husband), Piers Morgan, a gift. It was a copy of the book Ego is the Enemy. She thought he coul...

5 Maalis 20193min

Maybe you’ve had a hard time of it recently. That business project is three months over projections. Your book isn’t really selling. The comments in your performance review were brutal. Life can be li...

4 Maalis 20193min

Spring is here! While most of us unthinkingly set our clocks forward (or have devices that do it for us), how many of us take any steps to spring our lives forward? March is when we start to think of ...

1 Maalis 20194min