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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.
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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.
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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.
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Be more Alice! The fictional characters with lessons for lockdown
Should we be suspicious of the idea that fiction can help us to live meaningful lives?
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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