Debbie Foster

Israeli physicist named Yakir Aharonov basically agreed with Einstein about God not playing dice, and he proposed that the future is the hidden variable underlying quantum strangeness. Individual particles, such as those photons passing through the slits of the double-slit experiment, are actually influenced by what will happen to them next (i.e.,

"Snowfall in Sequoia National Park, California," …

That kind of title might not seem remarkable to you, but the wording works wonders because it falls into a marketing Goldilocks zone called the curiosity gap . You know what snow looks like, but you don't know what snow in Sequoia National Park looks like, so you become slightly more curious. You've

It's sugar that we want. We want the soft and supple sweetness. We want those tiny dissolvable bodies. We want enough of it to rot our teeth away. We want every cell to bloat with energy, we want all the dopamine released at once. And, yes, of course, such a fierce want will cause suffering. If the price paid to indulge this hunger seems high,

I would often whisper, Let's dream the same dream, right after we turned out the lights. He took it as a sweet sign-off, but I yearned for this joint dream so hard my teeth hurt. He didn't understand that you could create a world—a fantasy, a nightmare—and bring other people into it, not just artistically but in life. I was pretty good at getting

We must resist the temptation to drift along, reacting to whatever happens to us next, and deliberately select targets, from activities to relationships, that are worthy of our finite supplies of time and attention.

Sometimes what's wrong with reality is deeper than individual moral failings; sometimes our problems are greater than an inability to see each other's point of view. And boiling everything down to a failure of individual understanding can work as a neat and deliberate deflection away from those problems.

Melanie Boly, a neurologist and neuroscientist at the Medical School of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, is painstakingly collecting EEG data from long-term Buddhist meditators during a state known as pure presence, an experience with no self, no discursive thoughts, and no perceptual content except for a luminous expanse, an empty mirror.

We want to rush past our bitter moments, to a place of facility and ease, we want to be old at this new thing, but rushing won’t do it. Only time and repetition bring ease. Then it’s second nature, a walk in the park.

There's a membrane between imagining God's love as a thought experiment and experiencing it as absolute reality, and if you slip across it, the entire known universe shatters and reassembles itself to be more whole and beautiful than you thought was possible. I had forgotten.