Links to Articles and Podcasts

"It’s a challenging time to be an optimist. Climate change is widespread, rapid and intensifying. The threat of nuclear war is more complex and unpredictable than ever. Authoritarianism is resurgent. And these dangers were present even before we were beset by a historic pandemic. 

Most people stumble through life coping with the darker side of reality through some mixture of ignorance, indifference and avoidance." - by Brian Treanor for Psyche

We just felt somewhat joyless and aimless. It turns out there’s a name for that: languishing.

"Languishing is a sense of stagnation and emptiness. It feels as if you’re muddling through your days, looking at your life through a foggy windshield. And it might be the dominant emotion of 2021." - by Adam Grant for The New York Times

by Mirinda Kossoff

The poet Maya Angelou said, “You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.” I’ve found that to be true, both in my writing and my other creative endeavors—metal smithing, painting and collage. Link

"Since I wrote my book When Parents Hurt, my practice has filled with mothers and fathers who want help healing the distance with their adult children and learning how to cope with the pain of losing them. I also treat adult children who are estranged from their parents." Read the full article here.

Excerpt: “Dear Friends, I watched another movie on the Holocaust. I must stop watching these documentaries. So much of what I watched happened the year I was born 1941. We Christians claim we would never do such a thing. We have no blood on our hands! But as long as we teach our children 21st century Christian theology that non-Christians are damned and sent to extermination, are we not as guilty as the Nazis who exterminated the Jews? Who has the courage to put an end to this horrendous theology? Will any Christian please explain this to me? I want to die peacefully as a Christian pastor with no guilt for exterminating my neighbor…Is the Christian God better than the Nazis?”  Link 

By David L. Ulin

Recently, I noticed a headline in The New York Times that featured the word tasked. This is among my least favorite rhetorical strategies—the verbing of the noun. Contemporary American English is rife with such constructions: to journal, to parent, to impact, to effect. I wince a little every time I come across one. Link

“We are indebted to one another and the debt is a kind of faith — a beautiful, difficult, strange faith. We believe each other into being.” That’s the message the philosopher, poet, and historian, Jennifer Michael Hecht, puts at the center of her unusual writing about suicide. She’s traced how Western civilization has, at times, demonized those who died by suicide, and, at times, celebrated it as a moral freedom. She has struggled with suicidal places in her life and lost friends to it. She proposes a new cultural understanding based on our essential need for each other. Link

Authors discuss their creative process. 

For Gillian Flynn, a novel often arrives in a single mental image.

“I immediately had this picture of a man coming home to his house and the door flung wide open,” she says of what would become a pivotal scene in her game-changing “Gone Girl.” Flynn, laughing, describes it as the moment when antihero “Nick gets in trouble,” and the image was so entangled with Flynn’s real life that, in that first glimpse, Nick was walking through her own front door. Read this fascinating article here.