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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQmAHmLy5DA One of the most renowned of Chinese poets, Du Fu, survived the devastating An Lushan rebellion that nearly brought down the Tang Dynasty and resulted in an incredible loss of life around the country. His poems are full of grief, as translator David Hinton notes. The opening of “Spring Landscape” contains “possibly the most […] Marina Abramović’s Method for Overcoming Trauma: Go to...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hdT8PgT19w Who can resist miniatures? Wee food, painstakingly rendered in felted wool… Matchbook-sized books you can actually read… Classic record albums shrunk down for mice… The late Frances Glessner Lee (1878-1962) definitely loved miniatures, and excelled at their creation, knitting socks on pins, hand rolling real tobacco into tiny cigarettes, and making sure the victims in her […] The Gruesome Dollhouse Death Scenes That Reinvented Murder...

There are many roads through the coronavirus crisis. One is denial, which only makes things worse. Another is service and self-sacrifice, a choice we honor in the medical professionals putting their lives at risk every day. For most of us, however, the best course of action is non-action—staying home and isolating ourselves from others. Days […] How to Find Emotional Strength & Resilience During...

After his dismissal from Harvard for researching LSD with Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert left the U.S. for India in 1967. He devoted himself to the teachings of Hindu teacher Neem Karoli Baba and returned to the States a permanently changed man, with a new name and a message he first spread via the collaboratively-edited and […] Ram Dass (RIP) Offers Wisdom on Confronting Aging...

St. Benedict by Fra Angelico, via Wikimedia Commons We might imagine that life in a monastery is one of the safest, most predictable ways of life on offer, and therefore one of the least distracted. But “medieval monks had a terrible time concentrating,” writes Sam Haselby at Aeon, “and concentration was their lifelong work!” They […] Medieval Monks Complained About Constant Distractions: Learn How...

Disagree though we may about what's wrong with life in the 21st century, all of us — at least in the developed, high tech-saturated parts of the world — surely come together in lamenting our inability to focus. We keep hearing how distractions of all kinds, but especially those delivered by social media, fragment our […] How to Focus: Five Talks Reveal the Secrets...