David Pennington

Work, family, or friends: pick two. You can have it all, just not all at once.

I concluded that what we call “intelligence” is as much about virtues such as honesty, integrity, and bravery, as it is about “raw intellect.”

Something is deeply wrong when we sext the same way we order a sandwich.

I don’t think we’ve ever needed genuine works of art — imaginative creations that press us to see the world in larger or at least different ways than our standard everyday media-navigation categories allow — more than we do now. But our current resources are few, because of the ways the major art-related organizations have lost any discernible... See more

Narrative medicine is the discipline of applying the skills used in analyzing literature to interviewing patients.[1] The premise of narrative medicine is that how a patient speaks about his or her illness or complaint is analogous to how literature offers a plot (an interconnected series of events) with characters (the patient and others) and is... See more

But E.B. White, one of our last great idealists, was eternally right when he asserted half a century ago that the role of the writer is “to lift people up, not lower them down” — a role each of us is called to with increasing urgency, whatever cog we may be in the machinery of society.

Freud defined depression as anger turned inwards. There’s some truth to this for sure, but I think the great existential psychologist Rollo May defined it more accurately: “Depression is the inability to construct a future.”