Jonathan Simcoe

WHOSE HEART ISN’T prodigal? One of the gifts Augustine offers is a spirituality for realists. Conversion is not a “solution.” Conversion is not a magical transport home, some kind of Floo powder to heaven. Conversion doesn’t pluck you off the road; it just changes how you travel.

Far from the mountains in winter, I discovered the blurred photo of Everest in Richard Halliburton’s Book of Marvels.

‘Pride would be folly that disdained help and counsel at need; but you deal out such gifts according to your own designs. Yet the Lord of Gondor is not to be made the tool of other men’s purposes, however worthy. And to him there is no purpose higher in the world as it now stands than the good of Gondor; and the rule of Gondor, my lord, is mine and

Our grief is not what it was in the first days. It’s both better and worse. It’s perhaps not as sharp and pointed and not quite as constant as it was in the immediate aftermath. Yet as the weeks go by, we come to a deeper realization of what we’ve lost. As time passes, the ache deepens as we all come to a more advanced understanding of who Nick was

I wanted to be done with the fear and shame. I wanted to be done with the grief. I wanted to feel whole again.

Recent research out of Iceland, for example, had more than twenty-five hundred participants, many of them in desk jobs, try a four-day workweek.

How come Aquaman can control whales? They’re mammals! Makes no sense.

This tension between being swathed in the online world and going to a place with “true names” feels like one of the main contentions of anyone doing “deep work” today.

Hell, right now, I had to get out of bed and come downstairs and almost break my toe on a kettlebell to then lean over and type this out in a totally unergonomic posture. But this is

This week, I’ve been researching an ancient mnemonic technique called ‘the mind palace’, where people imprint a real or imagined building onto their memory - a palace, a mansion, a church, even a whole street - and then fill it with striking images, to which they attach bits of information they want to remember.