It is a rare gift, the ability to take any situation and ease it toward the pleasantest outcome, the kindest, the most beautiful; to make it a little more relaxed, a little more memorable.

When Diana turned eighteen her parents bought her a flat in London, so she moved to London and lived there. She lived with three friends whom she charged eighteen pounds a week. She painted the walls in pastels. She organized the cleaning schedule. She hung a sign on her bedroom door that said CHIEF CHICK.

Stability, tradition, the repetition of symbolic gestures, the preservation in politics of an identity with roots sunk in myth: These are advantages monarchy offers over more republican forms of democracy. In the United States, for instance, the election of each new president occasions panic and fury from the losing side, because the question of

Conservatives—think in Jonathan Haidt–ish terms here—value tradition, authority, and group identity; liberals value tolerance, fairness, and care.

Forward. As a preface here, think about the Harry Potter series. One of the reasons J. K. Rowling’s books exerted magnetic power over every sentient creature on earth is that they resolved, indeed fused, a cultural contradiction. She took the aesthetic of old-fashioned English boarding-school life and placed it at the center of a narrative about

Critics of twenty-first-century conservation movements have a term, “conservation colonialism,” to describe the way in which the overwhelmingly urban and international conservation paradigm, however well-meaning, unwittingly replicates the processes of colonial degradation.

The first, Man-Eaters of Kumaon, was a worldwide bestseller in the 1940s.

I was beginning to think that preserving nature for the next generation might seem a less academic notion in New York than on the threshold of the actual jungle—how under certain circumstances it might sound like a mystifying collection of words, and how it might in fact sound more mystifying the closer to “nature” one came.

A tiger had no concept of nature. A tiger saw what was. That was why tiger tracks lined the dirt roads all over the forest. The roads made it easier to get from one place to another, and what difference did it make to a tiger who put them there? It was a mistake to think you could imagine nature as something distinct from the part of nature that