This Sunday Sounds brings us the only surviving recording of one of my favorite writer’s voices – author Virginia Woolf.It is part of a BBC radio broadcast from April 29th, 1937. The talk was called “Craftsmanship” and was part of a series entitled “Words Fail Me.”  The audio is accompanied …

Almost every Saturday, I’ll post my BookStack for that week: the books I’m reading or have read during the previous 7 days. Sometimes, with commentary. Sometimes, without. From the top, a small and delightful book sent to me by my friend Lila, Robert Deyber Miniatures is a collection of sixty handcrafted stone …

After Felix, formerly Tess, was diagnosed with Autism, I stood back and examined my life. And, as many of you know, I took myself off the road and taught myself how to teach online instead. For three years, I didn’t travel – or very rarely – and this after years …

Some things I have found around the Web this week, and that I suggest you read. MIND The reductive seduction of other people’s problems is an important read. The opening example is an eye-opener, followed by this: If you’re young, privileged, and interested in creating a life of meaning, of course …

My mother died “unexpectedly” on December 21st last year. I say “unexpectedly” in quotation marks because honestly she had been wanting to die or trying to die, or at the very least had been trying to be sick enough to die, but then survive, for my whole life. I haven’t …

I have featured this poet on Poetry Wednesday many times before, and she was a keynote speaker at my very first Life is a Verb Camp. In fact, Andrea Gibson was the first person I knew I wanted to have at Camp. Her name was on a card on my office …

If there is a musical artist who defines my college years, it is this one. Joan Armatrading has been with me for decades now, and I share one of my favorites with you for Sunday Sounds: “Down to Zero.” I know all her songs by heart, and belt them out …

One of the most beloved gifts in our home is the BookStack, a stack of books chosen with love for the recipient. Sometimes there is a theme, like the time little Emma spent hours at Malaprop’s finding books for me whose titles were simply years (1492 or 1967, for example). …

by Jodi Cohen I have not moved the big pot of beef stew that I put in the refrigerator before my mother died. Today is the last day of shloshim, the 30-day mourning period. The beef stew, which did not work out, has been in there for probably 37 days, …

MIND If male scientists (or presidential candidates) were written about like female scientists. Ain’t that the truth. Welcome to the neuroscience of happiness: “…in the last 20 years, the scientific understanding of the brain has literally doubled. And that has given us much more clarity about the linkages between the mind …