“If you look at meditation, and you strip away the belief system, you find that essentially every meditation is attention training. It might be bringing your mind back to a mantra; some sound, or to your breath, or to a particular attentional stance. I like mindfulness of breathing, where you pay full attention to your in-breath, and to your out-breath, and then the next breath, the in-breath, and the out-breath. At some point, your mind is going to wander off. That's the way our minds are...

How can we enhance our emotional intelligence and avoid burnout in a changing world? How can we regain focus and perform in an optimal state? What do we mean by ecological intelligence? Daniel Goleman is an American psychologist, author, and science journalist. Before becoming an author, Goleman was a science reporter for the New York Times for 12 years, covering psychology and the human brain. In 1995, Goleman published Emotional Intelligence, a New York Times bestseller. In his newly...

“The Wandering is a choose your own adventure novel, and the reader is situated in the shoes of this brown woman from the Global South. She's 27 and in a way, she is stuck with her life. She aspires to be middle class, but her job doesn't allow her to achieve this social mobility. In her condition, she makes a deal with a devil, a reference to the story of Faust and Mephistopheles, finally getting a pair of red shoes that will take her anywhere. But that means she will never be able to find...

How are writing and travel vehicles for understanding? How can we expand the literary canon to include other voices, other cultures, other experiences of the world? Intan Paramaditha is a writer and an academic. Her novel The Wandering (Harvill Secker/ Penguin Random House UK), translated from the Indonesian language by Stephen J. Epstein, was nominated for the Stella Prize in Australia and awarded the Tempo Best Literary Fiction in Indonesia, English PEN Translates Award, and PEN/ Heim...

Environmentalists, writers, artists, activists, and public policy makers explore the interconnectedness of living beings and ecosystems. They highlight the importance of conservation, promote climate education, advocate for sustainable development, and underscore the vital role of creative and educational communities in driving positive change.

“As technology becomes more dominant, the arts become ever more important for us to stay in touch the things that the sciences can't tackle. What it's actually like to be a person? What's actually important? We can have this endless progress inside this capitalist machine for greater wealth and longer life and more happiness, according to some metric. Or we can try and quantify society and push it forward. Ultimately, we all have to decide what's important to us as humans, and we need the...

How is being an artist different than a machine that is programmed to perform a set of actions? How can we stop thinking about artworks as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences? In this conversation with Max Cooper, we discuss the beauty and chaos of nature and the exploration of technology music and consciousness. Max Cooper is a musician with a PhD in computational biology. He integrates electronic music with immersive video projections inspired by scientific...

"I want to be wowed by the world. I want to gaze at it in awe and wonder. And I think when we take a step back and begin to appreciate the complexity of the interactions around us. We're taking note of a very porous between the self and the rest of the world. We are literally observing our enmeshment in our environment. And it's that kind of a reference frameshift that I think is going to help us move out of some of the darkness. My mother is an artist, and I think growing up surrounded by...

How does a changing climate affect our minds, brains and bodies? Clayton Page Aldern is an award winning neuroscientist turned environmental journalist whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Economist, and Grist, where he is a senior data reporter. A Rhodes Scholar, he holds a Master's in Neuroscience and a Master's in Public Policy from the University of Oxford. He is also a research affiliate at the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology at the University of...

"Right from the beginning, in talking with Park Chan-wook, we wanted this sort of multiplicity of narrative voices and devices. In a way, it's about how the story, in this case of the Vietnam War, has been told, what the expected story is, at least, for American viewers, which they may mainly know through the movies and through visual representations. And it's how our lead character, The Captain, who is writing the story, who has divided loyalties. How can we capture the contradictions within...

What are the stories we tell ourselves to justify our actions in times of war? How can the arts convey complexity and foster understanding? Don McKellar is a highly accomplished writer, director, and actor. He has written films including Roadkill, Highway 61, Dance Me Outside, The Red Violin, and Blindness. He won the Prix de la Jeunesse at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival for his directorial debut, Last Night, which he also wrote and starred in. He is an eight-time Genie Award nominee and a...

"We ended on such a cliffhanger with Isaac presenting the wrench at the police station to Jeff Daniels' character. It allowed us to sort of start from a place of what's going to happen next? And I think because what is drawn in the novel and because of what Danny brought into the original script of the first season and all the ideas he brought in. The biggest thing we talked about was the relationship between Del Harris and Grace Poe and what is the ambiguity there? And I think when, when you...

What role do the families we’re born into or the traumas we experience shape the people we become? Do good deeds offset bad deeds? How can the arts increase our capacity for empathy, understanding, and kindness? Dan Futterman is creator, executive producer, and writer of Amazon Prime's American Rust, the acclaimed crime drama starring Jeff Daniels, Maura Tierney, and David Alvarez. Previously, Dan has written screenplays for Capote, Foxcatcher, In Treatment, and Gracepoint. He served as...

“The idea of a kind of inert world that is simply there for our pleasure, enjoyment, and exploitation has proved to be catastrophically mistaken because we see it with flooding, we see it with forest fires. We see it with acidification of the oceans. We see it with the continuing rise in temperatures that the world itself, the more-than-human world is fighting back. It has taken on its own agency. And therefore, the idea of a pyramid, a hierarchy, is no longer operative.”

How has tourism and writing about travel contributed to the ecological degradation of the planet?How does language influence perception and our relationship to the more-than-human world? Michael Cronin is an Irish academic specialist in culture, travel literature, translation studies, and the Irish language. He has taught in universities in France and Ireland and has held visiting research fellowships to universities in Canada, Belgium, Peru, France, and Egypt. He's a fellow of Trinity...

"The album 1 0 0 1 is really like a journey from our connection with nature to where we are now, in this moment where we're playing with technology. We're almost in this hybrid space, not fully understanding where it's going. And it's very deep in our subconscious and probably much greater than we realize. And it sort of ends in this space where the consciousness of what we're creating, it's going to be very separate from us. And I believe that's kind of where it's heading – the idea of...

What will happen when Artificial General Intelligence arrives? What is the nature of consciousness? How are music and creativity pathways for reconnecting us to our humanity and the natural world? Dustin O’Halloran is a pianist and composer and member of the band A Winged Victory for the Sullen. Winner of a 2015 Emmy Award for his main title theme to Amazon's comedy drama Transparent, he was also nominated for an Oscar, a Golden Globe, and a BAFTA for his score for Lion, written in...

"That idea of planting seeds for future generations came from the Tusculan Disputations. There’s something especially empowering about Cicero. And it's very striking that Thomas Jefferson and John Adams and so many in the Founding Era viewed this manual about overcoming grief as the definition for achieving happiness. And I think it's because it's a philosophy of self-mastery, self-improvement, and self-empowerment. I was moved to organize the book according to 12 virtues by noting the...

What is the true meaning of the pursuit of happiness? What can we learn from the Founding Fathers about achieving harmony, balance, tranquility, self-mastery, and pursuing the public good? Jeffrey Rosen is President and CEO of the National Constitution Center, where he hosts We the People, a weekly podcast of constitutional debate. He is also a professor of law at the George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor at The Atlantic. Rosen is a graduate of Harvard College,...

"For years, people spoke about how awkward or embarrassing it was to perform the intimate content. And what they're speaking about is feeling horrible. If something's awkward, that squirm, that ring in the body, it feels embarrassing. That's actually an emotion that is not professional. That is not allowing the actor to stay feeling listened to, heard, empowered, autonomous. And so that they can just get on without any of those concerns and do their job to their best ability. And that's the...

How can intimate scenes be brought to the screen in ways that respect the emotional well-being and privacy of the artists themselves? How do we make sure that we can create a story about abuse without anyone being abused in the process? Ita O’Brien is the UK’s leading Intimacy Coordinator, founder of Intimacy on Set (and author of the Intimacy On Set Guidelines). Her company, set up in 2018 provides services to TV, film, and theatre when dealing with intimacy, and is a SAG-Aftra accredited...

"The other big hard problem in philosophy is time. And I felt, you know, who better to lead me in this exploration than turtles, who live in some cases for centuries, who've been around...they arose with dinosaurs, yet they survived the asteroid impact. They are the embodiment of patience and wisdom. It's wonderful having an animal recognize you and be interested in you really acknowledges the animal in me. And that's the oldest, most sacred part of me, as far as I'm concerned."

What can turtles teach us about time, patience, and wisdom? What can we learn about the mysteries of consciousness by observing animals? How can we open our senses and embrace the interconnectedness of all life on Earth? Author Sy Montgomery and illustrator Matt Patterson are naturalists, adventurers, and creative collaborators. Montgomery has published over thirty acclaimed nonfiction books for adults and children and received numerous honors, including lifetime achievement awards from the...

"If you want to check in and get some clarity on what you believe, I tell people, well, just write something really honest and emotionally naked and read it back to yourself, and you'll see a lot of what you believe, think, fear, regret, desire, et cetera. We always reveal ourselves in our work. The truth is, I identify far more with those on the outside than on the inside. And even though from the outside it looks like I'm on the inside – you know, I'm a successful author, professor, white,...