Reflections on nature, culture & the inner life
I've been looking back on eight years of The New School. When we started in 2007, I thought we'd mostly tape phone conversations. Then it turned out that people liked to hear the conversations live. At first a dozen or so people would turn up. Over eight years, The...
These grassroots efforts are like a global immune system in that they are drawn to the wounded places and they begin to work. --Michael Lerner From Awakin Call Transcript, February 2015, and published June 2 on Daily Good. Read the transcript here or listen to the...
Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End By Atul Gawande, MD This is a book about the modern experience of mortality— about what it’s like to be creatures who age and die, how medicine has changed the experience and how it hasn’t. . . . Lacking a coherent...
"Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world," Joseph Campbell wrote. We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy. It is a hard saying, not an easy one. It reflects a great truth passed down for millennia. In Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, it...
If you are in search of some summer reading (or New School podcasts for your walks and drives), here are some suggestions: Thomas Picketty, Capital in the 21st Century. Paul Krugman says "the most important economics book of the year—and maybe of the decade. ...
On a recent trip, I visited a friend and colleague, Michael Samuels, on the island of Tinos in the Greek Mediteranean. Michael's house is poised for flight—precipitously above a steep, terraced valley flowing down to the blue water. He built the house as a temple:...
Each year I come to Europe for the month of May. Work brings me here. Delight keeps me coming back, as well as curiosity about the human condition. Take personal and social risk tolerances in different cultures as an example. Everywhere in Europe I see young people...
Robert McDermott is president emeritus of the California Institute of Integral Studies. His interests include wisdom philosophy, Hindu and Buddhist spiritualities, inclusive and esoteric Christianity, higher education, and Anthroposophy. We had a wonderful day-long...
The new year is a time for reflections and resolutions. What do we actually know? We know that the biological fabric of life on earth is unraveling. We know that we are so profoundly altering the conditions of life that no corner of the earth is untouched. We know...
Malcolm Margolin was born in a Jewish neighborhood in Dorchester outside Boston in 1940. He was a dreamy child with his nose always in a book. School bored him. A piercing intelligence pushed him forward. He graduated from Harvard, married his Radcliffe girlfriend,...