Natalie Audelo

there’s a real lack of palpable ambition and vitality these days, a stunning lack of life force in the world

Generosity is not a loan to repay or a debt to settle. It's a gift to appreciate. Yes, you can reciprocate a favor by paying it back. But the best way to honor an act of kindness is by paying it forward.

The limitation of our vision is not due to insufficient data. Instead, what I think we’re missing is a sense of imagination, creativity, and genuine curiosity. Without these elements, the act of research itself has lost its potency, our findings and interpretations reduced to a shallow performance, where the same ideas are recycled and repackaged... See more

The Great Diminishment has several causes. (The internet, social media, apathy, etc., all play a role. I’ve written more about how “everyone is numbing out.”) But a big cause is what I’ll call the “venture capitalization” of culture, where as much cost is squeezed out of every nook and cranny as possible, while prices remain the same or higher. You... See more

In recent years, I've begun to suspect that a life consumed by ideas will not bring me closer to the divine. The freedom I seek, it seems, doesn't lie in my laying about, steeped in my own brain, but rather in the stillness I've found in the more mundane moments of my life. In these moments, there is no euphoria, nor even any active reflection on... See more

And I do not want more doors—I want to walk through one without looking back. I want to love something long enough to feel it love me in return. I want to lay foundations on imperfect soil and call it home anyway.

But I have lost myself in a million other people. I’m no longer fluent in my own language. I’ve consumed so many dreams that weren’t... See more

It’s hard to see history when you’re in the middle of it, harder still to distinguish Swift’s impact on the culture from her celebrity, which emits so much light it can be blinding. But something unusual is happening with Swift, without a contemporary precedent. She deploys the most efficient medium of the day—the pop song—to tell her story. Yet... See more