Natalie Audelo

“There are old people who only think about the past, but it’s not like that around here.” She leaned her cane on a rock. “You have to do things,” she reflected. “There’s always a future, even if it’s very small.”

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” The critic and novelist Namwali Serpell told me that the quotation appeals to her in this moment, even though Žižek’s translation is slightly unfaithful to the original. The phrase “now is the time of monsters,” Serpell said, “allows us to think about the... See more

Poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire explains how great ideas arise:

"Inspiration is merely the reward for working every day."

Source: Curiosites Esthetiques (1868)

I don’t think that humans can really move forward into whatever’s coming for us next without facing what we’ve done to our home and each other. Such a reckoning includes the beauty, joy, and community found in crisis, as well as the pain. The sociologist Donna Haraway calls this “staying with the trouble.”

“It’s the Italian tradition of dining as a discussion,” the German author Hans von Trotha commented over dessert. At Santa Maddalena, unhurried meals, served with Monti’s century of stories and the camaraderie of table-side banter, break up the workday. The retreat functions like a sleepaway camp for great writers, its ritual group meals and hoursl... See more