Happiness
Story Stream
Winter Books January 02, 2025
Happy New Year! I hope everyone had a refreshing holiday season. My wife and I had a wonderful time in Victoria, but we are also glad to be back home and back to our weekly routines.Part of that weekly routine for me is this email, and I thought I’d ...
Want to Be Happier? January 02, 2025
When Sahil Bloom went out for a drink one evening in 2021, his friend said something that upended his life: “You’re going to see your parents 15 more times before they die.”That calculation—based on his parents’ ages (mid-60s at the time) and his inf...
A Review of 'The Pursuit of Happiness' June 07, 2024
In his first inaugural address, President George Washington declared that “there is no truth more thoroughly established, than that there exists in the economy and course of nature, an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness.” In a nation tha...
Parents Take Control June 04, 2024
During Covid, America’s public school teachers received full pay to stop doing their jobs, often for over a year. Officially, to be clear, Zoom school was in session. But “teaching” via Zoom was barely better than nothing. Zoom schools offered little...
National Disservice June 04, 2024
During my late teens, we pleasure-seekers drained three-day weekends by flooding our not-yet-fully formed brains with serotonin. Thousands of like-minds, posh and poor, black and white, swarmed a secretly disclosed valley in rural Wales. On the agend...
A Veteran Teacher’s Audacious Plan for Staving Off American Decline June 03, 2024
The following essay is adapted from the recently released book LESSONS IN LIBERTY: Thirty Rules for Living from Ten Extraordinary Americans (HarperCollins) by Jeremy S. Adams Decades and centuries in the future, historians will look back at our pecu...
A Conversation with Cally Fiedorek June 03, 2024
Last year, I had the pleasure of offering a blurb for Atta Boy, Cally Fiedorek’s debut novel. I was struck, right away, by her ability to so seamlessly navigate across the social strata of New York City. This is a vanishing art in the world of litera...
The Global Loss of Happiness May 29, 2024
Intro from Zach Rausch and Jon Haidt:Over the last year, Zach has written a series of articles examining the international scope of the youth mental health crisis. In his five-part series, he has shown that measures of anxiety, depression, and other ...
Low Life May 28, 2024
The Spectator of yore had an amusing device: the High Life/Low Life columns. What you got was exactly what it said on the tins. The irrepressible and apparently immortal Taki Theodoracopoulos (a founder of my own publication) would float on a cloud o...
The Princess in the Tribeca Loft May 24, 2024
At the end of Camelot, Arthur has lost the war, his queen, and his knights. At the end of The Once and Future King, it is even worse: Arthur knows he will lose his life. And yet in every iteration of the Arthurian legend, he wins. His voice is the on...
Funny or DIY May 22, 2024
It’sIt’s happy hour at the Permanent Records Roadhouse, a dive bar and record store in a potholed stretch of east Los Angeles, and Fred Armisen is advising the audience to talk through his set. “Feel free to text, interrupt, go, and come back,” he sa...
How Cindy Lee Became Music's Underground Success Story May 21, 2024
It's a happy indie parable for 2024, the way the headlines tell it: a hard-working veteran of the late 2000s underground self-releases, with no promotion, their 32-track magnum opus via sketchy download link on a GeoCities website designed like that ...
What Is the Deal With Jerry Seinfeld? May 17, 2024
Remember Bizarro Jerry? In the eighth season of Seinfeld, when the ubiquitous, insanely popular sitcom was edging away from the quotidian and into the surreal, Elaine broke up with a nice boyfriend named Kevin who declared himself perfectly happy to ...
On Alice Rohrwacher’s “La Chimera” May 17, 2024
IT’S A CLASSIC cop-out twist ending: it was all just a dream. What about a film that begins with one? A girl in an embroidered dress sliding off her shoulders, red thread unraveling at her bare feet. A happy day, but her brows are sad, upturned. The ...
The Sad Life of Carson McCullers May 14, 2024
The novels and stories of American writer, Carson McCullers, are populated by sad and lonely characters. They are perpetually seeking a sense of belonging, yet in some sense, they know that belonging is impossible. They remain outcasts and often meet...
On Joseph Epstein's 'Never Say You've Had a Lucky Life' May 10, 2024
Looks can be deceiving. Don’t judge a book by its cover. The grass isn’t always greener. Insert your line here for responses to the presumption that someone has it better, or that some situation is better.My comment as has always been that in looking...
The Impossible Is Indeed Possible May 10, 2024
Author Junot Diaz remembers a family member of his in the Dominican Republic who was believed to be a medium that would “become possessed” whenever she heard “certain kinds of music or certain kinds of drums.” In contrast to the rationalism that came...
Censorship in the New Regime Is Corporate May 08, 2024
October 14, 2020. It’s one of the dates etched in my mind, alongside my wedding anniversary, my kids’ birthdays, and my reception into the Catholic Church. Unlike those happy occasions, however, October 14 is associated with a dark memory. It was the...
Why Is Noting Married People Are Happier Controversial? February 19, 2024
Getting married is better than not getting married.Your health is better.You’re richer.You’re happier.More important, children who are raised by two married parents have an advantage over those who are not.Nothing about these factual statements shoul...
My Full Circle Moment in Kansas City February 15, 2024
What up, Substack fam! Happy Valentine’s Day. First off, a sincere apology for not posting here as consistently as I have in the past. We are officially one month out from VICTIM’s release (wild shit, right?) and your boy has been quite busy—in a goo...
Shiny, Happy People February 06, 2024
As election season gets underway, a spate of stories in corporate media and from medical associations warn of a collective wave of depression and despair hitting the United States, particularly surrounding politics. Much of it is manifested in lethar...
The World Needs Love, Hallmark Is Cashing In February 01, 2024
In this lull between perhaps the most successful slate of the Hallmark Channel’s Countdown to Christmas films ever and the Jane Austen-drenched debut of Hallmark’s Loveuary 2024, it’s time to admit that Hallmark movies are actually just Hollywood mov...
