The Literary Mind

Alain de Botton is a writer who appreciates the value of psychotherpay. In that spirit, he recently opened a bookstore in London that doubles as a therapy office, called The School of Life. The bookstore offers sessions with bibliotherapists (who find you books that are likely to change your habits), offers weekend “holidays,” with titles Holiday to Heathrow, and Philosophy by Bicycle, and hosts courses, not in abstract topics like “science” or “philosophy,” but in “How to Have Conversation” and “How to Die.” De Botton thinks traditional schooling has let us down and that overspecialization has shaped a lot of us into brilliant loners. Read More

 A new book, On Kindness, by psychologist Adam Phillips and historian Barbara Taylor, asks why we generally see independent people as strong and charitable people as dumber or less developed. It asks how we got to a place in human history in which heroism is most often depicted as independence, and in which we interpret small acts of random kindness as suspect--as a repressed need to be recognized, as a sign of an overly submissive nature, or even as a symptom of mental illness. Read More

The New York Times recently staged the Wikipedia-Rorschach debate that's been going on at least since June, when emergency room doctor James Heilman posted all 10 ink blots on Wikipedia, along with the most frequent form responses. Heilman says that restricting this information from the public domain would be akin to "the Chinese government's attempt to control information about the Tiananmen massacre," according to The Times. Read More

Frank Bruni, The New York Times restaurant critic, was or is bulimic. We know this because he published a brave excerpt from his forthcoming memoir in last week's The New York Times Magazine. 

Bruni shows us that owning our addictions can be the key to knowing what our strengths are. Read More