Rishita Chaudhary

We can define rituals as symbolic techniques of making oneself at home in the world. They transform being-in-the-world into a being-at-home. They turn the world into a reliable place. They are to time what a home is to space: they render time habitable. They even make it accessible, like a house. They structure time, furnish it. In his novel

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RITUAL Our problem isn’t just that we are in the habit of shirking important ideas. We are also prone to forget them immediately even if we have in theory given them our assent. For this, humanity invented ritual. Ritual can be defined as the structured repetition of important concepts, made resonant through the help of formal pageantry and

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If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start.

But obsession is intoxicating. And anyone who has been obsessed knows that. Obsession pulls you in like quick sand. It immerses you. And the most startling part is that you go willingly. If you wanted to resist it, you could. But there’s that moment, that line, where you let

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The idea of cognitive bias in psychology works in an analogous way. A cognitive bias is a systematic error in how we think, as opposed to a random error or one that’s merely caused by our ignorance. Whereas statistical bias skews a sample so that it less closely resembles a larger population, cognitive biases skew our thinking so that it less... See more

I’m often asked if there is something I think writers ought to do, and recently in an interview I heard myself say: “Several things. Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.”