Come to California If You Want to Live

The Golden State’s Focus on Education, Health Care, and Gun Control Creates a Gold Standard for Longevity

Come to California if you want to live.

That’s my New Year’s suggestion for a new state slogan. California is losing population for the first time since it became a state. The cause of the problem is not people leaving—in fact, our levels of departures, as percentage of population, are among the very lowest in the nation. Rather, the problem is that so few people are moving here.

The biggest reason for that is well known: The cost of living in the Golden State is among America’s highest. But less well known …

What Is the Meaning of Life? | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian

What Is the Meaning of Life?

For Sir Paul Nurse, Creativity and Community Are Essential Building Blocks

What does it take to create meaning in our lives? According to Sir Paul Nurse, a Nobel laureate geneticist and author of What Is Life?, supporting family and community as …

How the Skull Is an Ally in Art

When the Ultimate Symbol of Death Serves as Muse, It Can Force Us to Confront Our Own Mortality

You walk through the darkness of the crypt, with choral music playing from hidden speakers. All around you, human bones are arranged in patterns, tiling the walls, divided by femurs, …

The Game of Non Existence

Did you ever play at non-existence?

My brother and I taught ourselves to play the game
no one else would’ve shown two kids:

how to lean forward under the counter,
under our …

Time to Wake Up, I Guess

Sometimes a hawk will stand on a starling, periodically shaking it with a peeved look on its face. This is your life trying to wake you up. Or just a …

Raising the Pine

The welwitschia mirabilis

lives, knotted, for thousands of years
out in the African sun. Its two leaves
become a tangled mass of time

as they grow outward.

O Namibia. O …