Rishita Chaudhary

This middle step is sometimes called a “liminal phase,” and, in turn, the before and after are sometimes called the pre-liminal and post-liminal phases. Liminal comes from the Latin word for threshold. So ritual is a portal into another world. This is just as true for rituals that happen once a year—say, decorating the Christmas tree—as those that

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He described modernity’s obsession with Machen —do/make—as the belief that only what we can build, manipulate, or produce is real. This becomes the default metaphysics of acceleration: faster iteration, more output, more control. But Ratzinger contrasts this with another mode of being: Verstehen and Stehen —to understand and to stand. That is, to... See more

Sontag points to literature’s essential allure — the comfort of appeasing our anxiety about life’s infinite possibility, about all the roads not taken and all the immensities not imagined that could have led to a better destination than our present one. A story, instead, offers the comforting finitude of both time and possibility:

love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even... See more

t I am only interested in people as long as they are unpredictable to me. If I can predict what you’ll do or say, I’ll lose interest in you rapidly. If you can keep regularly surprising me in some way, forcing me to actually think in unscripted ways in order to respond, I’ll stay interested. It’s reciprocal. I suspect the people with whom I develop... See more

There is still a drastic mismatch between the cultural script around marriage, in which a man grudgingly acquiesces to a woman salivating for a diamond, and the reality of marriage, in which men’s lives often get better an women’s lives often get worse. Married men report better mental health and live longer than single men; in contrast, married... See more