Escape into Meaning: Essays on Superman, Public Benches, and Other Obsessions

The vibrant “life between buildings” in Europe is a result of iteration as much as good design. As Gehl points out, urban planning didn’t come into its own until the Renaissance, and many European city centers formed prior to that. They “evolved through a process that often took many hundreds of years… this slow process permitted continual adjustme

The internet of today, designed to make you a permanent input, does more than just steal time from you; it erodes your agency and substitutes internet-awareness for self-awareness. Those are the three things—time, agency, and self-awareness—that we use to construct our identities. Without them, sense of self weakens, identity destabilizes, and the

Public benches disappear into the background with whomever is on them, and in that camouflage the bothersome ego can disappear, too.

I first read Camus’s essay “The Myth of Sisyphus” in my twenties, and it was like seeing a transcript of my thoughts.II “That nostalgia for unity,” writes Camus, “that appetite for the absolute illustrates the essential impulse of the human drama.” The impulse for meaning is baked into us, and we can’t rid ourselves of it, no matter how squarely we

The solution to that cluelessness is not more reflection, but to ask questions and listen.

The best description of the numinous belongs not to Otto, but to C. S. Lewis, a friend of Tolkien: Suppose you were told there was a tiger in the next room: you would know that you were in danger and would probably feel fear. But if you were told “There is a ghost in the next room,” and believed it, you would feel, indeed, what is often called fear

When I lie down to bed each night, putting my phone, aptly, on Do Not Disturb, I have a hard time remembering ten unbroken minutes in the day during which I did not, in some way, connect. The internet permeates my waking life. It’s omnipresent, invasive. Part of me lives online now. That’s indisputable. But lately I’ve begun to wonder about the opp

Intuition often fails us, especially when coupled with ignorance, or when we take our experience to be representative of all experience. While I do believe that in many cases, the deeper we descend into our own minds, the more universal it gets, I also know that is not true in many cases. And if there’s anything the revolutions in social justice ha

The future folded into the past, and vice versa. “Cities are like compost heaps,” he told The Paris Review in 2011. “Just layers and layers of stuff. In cities, the past and the present and the future can all be totally adjacent.”

Emerson isn’t a philosopher in the pure sense or a theologian. He’s an intellectual adventurer, a journalist of the mind, an essayist.