The Mother’s Rage: Elena Ferrante and the Torment of Maternal Love
For many years, it seemed as though every colleague, student, or friend was urging me to read Elena Ferrante. Read More
The Politics of Anger: Putin and the Psychology of Rage
It’s just gone 7 a.m.in my consulting room. I’m staring into the thin powder blue of the early March sky as the day’s first patient readies himself on the couch. I look over, notice the taut knotting of his brow, the tight squeeze of his lowered eyelids, and feel the air between us thicken. Read More
The perfectionism trap
As a young university lecturer two decades ago, I taught a course on 19th-century American literature. Though I loved the period, my students were less enamoured. Read More
Death still driving
I agreed to write this piece a lifetime ago – at the end of February, when a certain virus was just hovering at the edge of consciousness Read More
Lazy Boy
For two years my daydreams had been haunted by an image, more accurately a GIF, looping on the inside wall of my skull. Read More
Back to work blues? What we can learn from slackers
In 1999, crowds of art lovers, many of them baffled, filed into London’s Tate gallery to view My Bed, a work quickly established as one of the most iconic and notorious of our age. Read More
The incurious rabbit
Years ago, for a few wintry months before he lost his head to a fox, I was lumbered with the daily care of a rabbit named Rr. Read More
Minds Turned to Ash
When Steve first came to my consulting room, it was hard to square the shambling figure slumped low in the chair opposite Read More
Private parts: writers and the battle for our inner lives
At the end of last year, an international group of writers drafted a petition decrying the escalation of state surveillance and calling for a digital bill of rights to protect the privacy of all global citizens. Read More