After suffering a terrible concussion, game designer Jane McGonigal created a game to help her feel better. In the years since, it's helped nearly half a million other people overcome depression, anxiety and other mood disorders.More
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Arts and Culture
Game developer Tracy Fullerton tells us why Henry David Thoreau would play her new game. It’s called “Walden.”More
Mark just built a new house. In fact, he built a whole town. And it's the one place we can actually visit, because it’s inside a game. He’s been taking refuge from the grim reality of a global pandemic...in Animal Crossing.More
Poems can hold grief and mark loss. But what about love? Romantic love. Poet Li-Young Lee understands this completely. Because he’s in love.More
Jimmy Santiago Baca was in a maximum security prison. He taught himself to read and fell in love with words. Today he’s a champion of the International Poetry Slam, and the author of multiple books of verse.More
Hope is a complicated, even slippery, word. One that demands a poet’s voice. Here’s Alice Walker, reading her poem “Hope is a Woman Who Has Lost Her Fear.”More
Poet Edward Hirsch has written many collections of poetry and criticism. He wrote the long-running “Poet’s Choice” column in the Washington Post. He spoke with Steve Paulson about his elegy to his son, “Gabriel: A Poem.”More
In Madison, Wisconsin, there’s a place a lot of women with scars go. It’s a studio run by a tattoo artist — Alissa Waters — who specializes in the scars left from breast cancer surgery. Her tattoos help women reclaim their bodies.More
Living through a global pandemic is giving us all a whole new awareness of skin. Producer Angelo Bautista has been thinking a lot about his own skin — how to claim it, care for it, and all the ways he lives in it.More
Writer, classicist, and stand-up comic Natalie Haynes makes a strong case for reading ancient Greek and Roman literature in the modern age.More
John Givens invites us into his kitchen where he cooks his family's traditional greens.More
Filmmaker Bara Jichova Tyson had every reason to be cynical about romance after what she saw growing up under Communist rule. But it turns out love can come along when you least expect it — including while you're filming a movie about cheating and failed relationships.More
Living in this COVID-19 quarantine makes it especially tough for those looking for love, or at least a good date. But according to dating coach Logan Ury, there may be a silver lining to this enforced isolation — maybe even the jolt they need to break out of bad dating habits.More
One of the first assumptions we make about a relationship is that it begins with sexual attraction. But what about desire without sex? Angela Chen explores the contradictions — and the possibilities — of asexuality in her new book.More
Rafael Campo is a doctor who's also a prize-winning poet. He sees medicine and writing as two different modes of healing. And during the pandemic, writing poetry has been his way to bear witness to the many people who lost their voices to COVID-19.More
Wade Davis has been called the Indiana Jones of anthropology. He says the aboriginal people of Australia have a fundamentally different way of seeing the world than we do in modern society.More
Photographer Rachel Sussman has documented 30 of the oldest living things in the world. Beautiful and romantic, her photos document both the adaptation and fragility inherent to surviving for tens of thousands of years. More