Unabashedly Bookish

Ever heard a few scattered details about a life and fantasized it was yours? Details were strung together with dots. I had the unrooted fantasy of being Carla Bruni. Read more...

I used to read Carlo Castaneda in high school--those magical books peppered with peyote, metaphysical revelation, and transcendence. Castaneda wrote books which weren’t fully fiction or memoir, in which he described his spiritual apprenticeship under a soft-spoken, often-drugged shaman named don Juan. Read more...

I ran cross-country in high school, and our coach used to recommend books to get us excited to race. The books worked, because they helped make running feel meaningful throughout the whole day. I felt as if I had a sense of purpose even when just sitting in class. Read more...

Mathematician Timothy Gowers thinks groups are often smarter than individuals. In that light, last January he tried to solve a math problem no one had solved—a proof of the density Hales-Jewett theorem when k=3—in an online community. He posted the problem on his blog and welcomed people around the world to come together to solve it. Read more...

A friend recently told me that Up in the Air--the new movie about a man obsessed with taking airplane flights, based on the novel by Walter Kirn--was more sentimental than the book was. The movie, he said, is about a man growing out of his neuroses; and the book is about a man being increasingly trapped in them. “The movie is too ‘Hollywood,’” he said. “It bullies you into feeling certain emotions.” Read more...

Our experiences inside airports often inspire alternative lives. When walking to a gate for a flight, our ideas of our careers, hobbies, or love lives can kaleidoscopically shift. As de Botton writes, "Original thoughts are like shy animals. We sometimes have to look the other way--towards a busy street or terminal--before they run out of their burrows." Taking trips allows us to escape the doldrums, for a bit. Read more...

My job as a therapist at the psychiatric hospital is often hard. Patients here wrestle with delusion, depression, and trauma, and parts of it rub off. Making it through to 5:00 every day is a little victory. Read more...

Some race conversations are harder than others are. At times we can talk about race with lightheartedness, and at other times, we can't. There are reasons for that. When talk leads to a real need for change, we usually resist it. Read more...

Last night I saw a powerful play out about the health care debate, Anna Deveare Smith's Let Me Down Easy. Smith writes in a unique way: She writes one-woman plays by recording interviews with real people, cutting them to size, and committing them to memory. She becomes each of her interviewees on stage, to present the sort of powerful discussion that would never happen, by chance, around a dinner table. Read more...

Freud said that whether we intend it or not, we're all poets. That's because on most nights, we dream. And dreams are lot like poetry, in that in both things, we express our internal life in similar ways. We use images more than words; we combine incongruent elements to evoke emotion in a more efficient way than wordier descriptions can; and we use unconscious and tangential associations rather than logic to tell a story. Read more...