Alex Dobrenko

nowhere.” It is the conviction that in order to describe the world accurately and empirically, we must put aside res cogitans—the subjective, immediate way in which we experience the world in our minds—and limit ourselves to res extensa, the objective, mathematical language of physical facts. Without these distinctions, it’s difficult to imagine th

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The feeling when you jump from a high place and fall through warm air and then hit the water. The way the bubbles explode white around you as you shoot into the dark. The light tickling as the bubbles rush across your skin.

Just the pure physical joy of thrashing your arms around in water. To fill the kid’s buckets and throw it at the sun—the way th... See more

Some Zen Buddhists hold that the entirety of human suffering can be boiled down to this effort to resist paying full attention to the way things are going, because we wish they were going differently (“This shouldn’t be happening!”), or because we wish we felt more in control of the process. There is a very down-to-earth kind of liberation in grasp... See more

I was able to thrive on Substack because it was the culmination of almost 15 years of learning how to reach directly to readers. I’d gained some skills along the way. Even more, I came to Substack totally committed to this way of operating.

In the aggregate, Andrew’s therapeutic language took on a sinister edge. It was communicating a commitment that was not real, a profound interest in the internality of women that was then used to manipulate them.

Amid the stone sculptures of Hindu demons, mythological temple guardians and Buddhist divinities, Cambodian officials this month recognized the success of lengthy years of repatriation efforts with a ceremony at the prime minister’s office in Phnom Penh. In a room filled with artifacts, officials formally welcomed the return of statues and other ob... See more