LifeStyle World

Of Trees, Tenderness, and the Moon: Hasui Kawase’s Stunning Japanese Woodblock Prints from the 1920s-1950s

Sylvan sublimity between the heavens and the deep blue sea. “After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on — have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear — what remains?” the aging Walt Whitman asked in his diary as he contemplated what makes life worth […]

LifeStyle World

The Herd, the Hive, and the Human Spirit: Eula Biss on Immunity, Sanity, and Health as Communal Trust

“We are protected not so much by our own skin, but by what is beyond it. The boundaries between our bodies begin to dissolve here… Immunity… is a common trust as much as it is a private account.” Months after Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring awakened humanity to the delicate interdependence of nature, Dr. King awakened […]

LifeStyle World

A Cenotaph for Newton: The Poetry of Public Spaces, the Architecture of Shadow, and How Trees Inspired the World’s First Planetarium Design

How a forgotten visionary’s futuristic dream dared generations to reimagine the relationship between nature and human creativity. Nineteen years after the publication of Isaac Newton’s epoch-making Principia — in England, in Latin — the prodigy mathematician Émilie du Châtelet set out to translate his ideas into her native French, making them more comprehensible in the […]

LifeStyle World

Alan Watts on the Meaning of Freedom, the Only Real Antidote to Fear, and the Deepest Wellspring of Love

“You cannot think simultaneously about listening to the waves and whether you are enjoying listening to the waves.” “Fearlessness is what love seeks,” Hannah Arendt wrote in her superb 1929 meditation on love and how to live with the fundamental fear of loss. “Such fearlessness exists only in the complete calm that can no longer […]

LifeStyle World

The Peace of Wild Things: Wendell Berry’s Poetic Antidote to Despair, Animated

On where to seek refuge from the forethought of grief. Two hundred years ago, in a prophetic book envisioning a twenty-first-century world savaged by a deadly pandemic, Mary Shelley considered what makes life worth living, insisting that in the midst of widespread death and despair, we must seek peace in the “murmur of streams, and […]

LifeStyle World

Dorothy Lathrop’s Dreamscapes: Haunting Century-Old Illustrations of Fairy-Poems by the Woman Who Became the First to Win the Caldecott Medal

Poetic enchantments in pen, ink, and imagination. In the final stretch of World War I, having earned a degree from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in an era when under 4% of women graduated college, Dorothy Pulis Lathrop (April 16, 1891–December 30, 1980) was commissioned to illustrate a book of experimental imagist poems by […]

LifeStyle World

Proximity: A Meditative Visual Poem for Those Reaching for Something They Can’t Quite Grasp, Inspired by Trees

Soulful sylvan consolation partway between David Byrne, Bill T. Jones, and the Buddha. When I am sad, I like to imagine myself becoming a tree. Branches that bend without breaking, fractal with possibility, reaching resolutely toward the light. Roots touching the web of belonging beneath the surface of the world, that majestic mycelial network succoring […]