This Is What Comes Next

Life was just one thing after another for Marcus Aurelius. The plague. The flooding. The wars. He did not meet with, “the good fortune he deserved,” one ancient historian noted, “as his whole reign wa...

17 Feb 20238min

Seneca wasn’t fond of philosophers you could recognize. Not by their fame, but by their uniform. In his time, just as it is in ours, there was a type of person who, in reading about the Diogenes types...

16 Feb 202316min

Ryan speaks with Professor Massimo Pigliucci about his new book The Quest for Character: What the Story of Socrates and Alcibiades Teaches Us about Our Search for Good Leaders, what Alcibiades’s magne...

15 Feb 202355min

Ruby Doris Smith died at age 25 of cancer. It was an unfair death, concluding a short, unfair life. For two and half decades on this earth – from 1942 to 1967 – she experienced the brutal day-to-day r...

15 Feb 20234min

We know what we want to do–or need to do. We need to quit that job. We need to have that hard conversation. We need to be more active in our community. We need to stop smoking or start eating healthy....

14 Feb 202316min

The writers Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse Five) and Joseph Heller (Catch-22) were at a glamorous party outside New York City. Standing in the palatial second home of the billionaire host, Vonnegut beg...

13 Feb 20239min

Today’s reading features an excerpt from The Way to Love: The Last Meditations of Anthony de Mello. Anthony was an Indian Jesuit priest, psychotherapist, and spiritual teacher, writer, and public spea...

12 Feb 202320min

Ryan speaks with Dr. Samantha Boardman about her book Everyday Vitality: Turning Stress into Strength, how you can improve your life by changing small daily habits, why feeling stressed is not necessa...

11 Feb 20231h 7min