https://arab.news/v8hed
Courtney Carver’ “Gentle” is the “don’t do it all” self-help book you need to live with less stress and more ease, less overwhelm and more joy.
Grounded in self-compassion and a fierce commitment to less, becoming “Gentle” isn’t about taking the easy road.
It’s a practice of real self-care that, over time, will soothe your nervous system and strengthen your relationships.
Authors: Edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns
This classic one-volume edition of the complete writings of Plato is now available in paperback for the very first time.
The editors, Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, chose the contents from the work of the best modern British and American translators.
The volume contains prefatory notes to each dialogue, by Hamilton; an introductory essay on Plato’s philosophy and writings, by Cairns; and a comprehensive index with cross references.
In a new foreword, acclaimed philosopher and novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein describes Plato’s unparalleled importance to philosophy down to the present day.
Author: Annie Dillard
Annie Dillard’s essay “Total Eclipse” begins with stale coffee and roadside chatter but detonates into a primal reckoning with the universe’s indifference.
Published in her 1982 collection “Teaching a Stone to Talk,” the essay documents Dillard’s experience of the 1979 solar eclipse, transforming a celestial event into a visceral confrontation with human fragility.
Dillard lulls readers with the mundane: tourists snapping photos, jokes about “eclipse burgers,” and the nervous anticipation of a crowd waiting for darkness.
Then, with the moon’s first bite into the sun, her prose turns feral. Colors warp, the sky bleeds, as if reality were glitching. This is not a mere description; it is an assault on our trust in the ordinary.
The essay’s power lies in its unflinching honesty. When totality hits, Dillard does not romanticize awe or resilience. Instead, she strips humanity bare: we are temporary creatures dwarfed by cosmic forces. The vanished sun becomes a “black pupil,” the landscape a “film reel skipping.”
Unlike typical nature writing that seeks solace in beauty, “Total Eclipse” offers no comfort. The returning sunlight feels like a lie, the restored world a fragile façade.
Dillard admits she is shaken, haunted by the void’s indifference. It is this refusal to soften the blow that makes the essay endure. In an age of curated awe, her words are a gut-punch reminder: darkness does not care if we blink.
Stylistically, Dillard masterfully mirrors the eclipse’s arc — calm, chaos, uneasy calm. This is not a science lesson or a spiritual guide, but a raw testimony that some truths cannot be explained, only endured.
“Total Eclipse” remains vital because it dares to stare into the abyss without blinking. Dillard does not ask us to find meaning but to confront how little meaning there is to find.
And in that confrontation, there is a strange kind of clarity: to see our smallness is to glimpse the universe, unforgiving and vast.
In “The Anxious Generation,” Jonathan Haidt lays out the facts about the epidemic of teen mental illness that hit many countries at the same time. Haidt diagnoses the “collective action problems” that trap us, and then proposes four simple rules that might set us free. He describes steps that parents, teachers, schools, tech companies, and governments can take to end the epidemic of mental illness and restore a more humane childhood.
Bruce Robbins’ “Atrocity” explores the literary representations of mass violence and traces the emergence of a cosmopolitan recognition of atrocity.
What is achieved is a profound exploration of the emergence of abhorrence and indignation in the face of mass violence and a critical examination of the conditions for the emergence of cosmopolitanism — the ability to look at your own nation with the critical eyes of a stranger.
The current rise of nationalism across the globe is a reminder that we are not, after all, living in a borderless world of virtual connectivity.
In “Nationalism,” historian Eric Storm sheds light on contemporary nationalist movements by exploring the global evolution of nationalism, beginning with the rise of the nation-state in the 18th century through the revival of nationalist ideas in the present day.
