Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score was pitched to me by several people as the best book for a crash course in trauma research and modern treatments. It did not disappoint. This impressive summary of discoveries and lessons from van der Kolk’s long career is an essential text for anyone looking to enter the […]
When Ezra Klein says something like, “this is the most important book I read this year,” there’s little question as to what I’ll do next. That’s how Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future made its way into my life, and boy am I glad it did! This remarkable, brilliant, and wildly useful book is one […]
Greetings, dear friends of the present and curious citizens of the future. For my first pandemic journal of 2021, it’s hard to know where to start. I published my last journal about two months ago, and the pileup of news since then has been overwhelming. In just eight weeks, the pandemic got a lot worse […]
Several friends recommended William R. Miller and Stephen Rollnick’s Motivational Interviewing as a reliable and longstanding practice that would be useful for an aspiring counselor to explore. The book is a terrific resource for professionals and laypeople interested in the language of change and dynamics of personal development. Miller and Rollnick originally invented motivational interviewing (MI) in […]
My Year of Bookish Wisdom 2020: Superlatives on Strike! You heard it here first: I am predicting that, in 2021, superlatives in every language around the world will join together in a globe-spanning strike. 2020 was just too much––they can’t take it anymore. “Worst” just collapsed from exhaustion and has been confined to quarters, “hardest” […]
Lily Brooks-Dalton’s Good Morning, Midnight was the perfect book to wrap up a tough and tumultuous year. This short, dazzling novel is a mournful but energetic meditation on humanity’s struggle to find meaning and connection in a vast and threat-strewn universe. Brooks-Dalton’s narrative toggles back and forth between two plot threads, both set against the ominous backdrop […]
When I decided to pursue a career in counseling, a mentor recommended Carl Rogers as one of the key historical figures in the development of modern psychotherapy. On Becoming a Person is a collection of essays originally published between 1951 and 1961, each presenting a portion of Rogers’s insights from over thirty years of counseling and psychological […]
I first read Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov about a decade ago, and shortly thereafter forgot almost everything about it. Upon revisiting this long and strange book, the reasons I found it so forgettable are more obvious, as are the fine qualities that make it an indisputable classic. This story of three brothers––of their flaws, torments, and moments […]
Charles Wheelan’s Naked Statistics provides a serviceable summary of a field most people don’t properly understand and often misinterpret. “The paradox of statistics,” Wheelan writes, “is that they are everywhere––from batting averages to presidential polls––but the discipline itself has a reputation for being uninteresting and inaccessible” (xii). He makes a spirited though imperfect effort to resolve this paradox […]
Author’s Note: This essay was originally published as a three-part series by Science and Philosophy on Medium (see posts here, here, and here). This is the original unedited version, which includes an additional section in Part Three that I edited out when submitting for publication. Introduction: (De)Liberation in Times of Crisis In 1918, the world was reeling from […]