Human beings are the only creatures who can make themselves miserable. Other animals certainly suffer when they experience negative events, but only humans can induce negative emotions through self-views, judgments, expectations, regrets and comparisons with others. Because self-thought plays such a…

Han Cheng Yeh/Flickr Last year, a reporter in the Guardian described how the Man Booker Prize judges spent ‘a summer… devouring novel after magnificent novel’, culminating in their selection of ‘a (baker’s) dozen’. This is nothing unusual. The language of eating is often used to describe reading…

Photographed by Kate Anglestein I remember being 15 and flicking through magazines; every time I came across an interview with a pop singer or TV star, I’d frantically skim-read – not to find out their ideal boy or girlfriend, or their skincare routine, but to check their age. Then, I’d mentally…

Anthony Bourdain, the Distinguished Motherf*cker of Food, Is 60 America's culinary renegade is now part of the food establishment. That doesn't mean he's not pushing boundaries—and still mortified of writing a bad sentence. WRITTEN BY JOHN BIRDSALL PHOTOGRAPHY BY DAVID CABRERA / ANDY HUR The man…

Marc Burckhardt On a humid afternoon this past November, I pulled off Interstate 75 into a stretch of Florida pine forest tangled with runaway vines. My GPS was homing in on the house of a man I thought might hold the master key to one of the strangest scholarly mysteries in recent decades: a…

The ancient Romans believed in generous vacations: They took sightseeing tours for two to five years at a time. In more recent centuries, Europeans of means and faint constitutions spent multiple months languishing at spas. Even Jesus withdrew for 40 days and 40 nights to find some peace and quiet…

Reset your password Blog By Anne T. Donahue on Thursday, Jun 23rd, 2016 Back to the Blog Web and Android coming soon. Get the lemon Newsletter Best of Series: The Best Online Checking Account Learn Money, Inc. 81 Prospect Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201 © 2016 Learn Money, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Is it just me, or is everybody out there looking for a quick fix? There is something highly compelling about the idea that there is a secret switch we can flip to become suddenly smarter, to reveal cognitive abilities hidden inside each of us. It is a notion that certainly has commercial appeal.…

Work / Photography Lunching at your desk is never a glamorous affair; crumbs gather in your keyboard, mayo gets smeared on your mouse and the reality of spending more time at your desk at work than at home slowly sets in as you gulp down the low fat yoghurt you bought as a “treat”. Capturing the…

To a certain kind of nerd, Ev Williams is the Forrest Gump of internet media. Williams helped write the software that made us call blogs blogs . He founded a podcast company years before most people listened to them. He sent Twitter’s 75th tweet , then ran the company. And now he’s the founder and…

“I love being English, and I don’t want to be a European.” — Gillian Duffy, “bigoted woman” As UK voters go to the polls to vote on membership of the European Union, the woman most famous for being called a “bigot” by a sitting Prime Minister might seem like an unlikely political sage. But amidst…

Have sleeping bag, will travel Sometimes running on its own isn’t enough. Sometimes you need adventure. R unning is a broad church. At times we use it as a competitive outlet, at others an effective mental health regimen; we use running as a tool for exploration and we use it as a routine off which…

As a foreign correspondent, you often wonder if it is always worth going out of your way to be sure of getting a story. Only occasionally, however, do you experience the opposite: you make the effort to go somewhere and you can’t use any of it. The time that sticks closest in my mind is when I went…

Alex Massie 16 June 2016 6:17 PM 16 June 2016 6:17 PM Share Events have a multiplier effect. And when they come in bunches the effect can be overpowering. This was already a sad and demeaning day, even before we heard the ghastly news a Labour MP, Jo Cox, had been murdered outside her constituency…

Documentary James Burns 10 minutes We Live This We Live This is the story of four boys from the projects who have come together to pursue their dreams. Most New Yorkers who ride the MTA have opinions about them, but what lies beneath these young performers is more than what meets the eye.

‘Do thinking work in the morning.’Photograph: Alamy W e are designed by evolution to be busy. That’s OK for the caveman, who needs to feed himself; not OK for you in the 21st-century when you have to deal with an ever-growing range of tempting distractions. Which is why it is so baffling that Paris…

PHOTOGRAPH BY PETER MARLOW / MAGNUM On paper, my life seemed great. I had a dream job, a swanky apartment, and a loving girlfriend. But something was off. I couldn't bear being chained to my desk in a stuffy office any longer. So I decided to quit and travel the world, bringing only my passport, a…

Diana Kimball Berlin Big fan of reading and writing. Product leader, podcaster, and coach. https://dianaberlin.com Apr 3, 2016 Go on a Readtreat Group photo by Marcin Wichary . Full album on Flickr . In the summer of 2012, I spent a weekend reading with seven friends. We printed binders full of…

This summer, the quintessentially un-Hollywood Viggo Mortensen stars in a film about a father of six who rejects the world to raise his kids completely off the grid. How much does this character resemble the actor himself? Let's start with his flip phone. Viggo Mortensen has come bearing pancake…

K ismet” is the word Jessica Carbino likes to use. She joined Tinder in October 2013, about a year after it launched in Los Angeles. Carbino was 27 and “looking.” She was also a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at UCLA, writing her thesis on online dating. An undergraduate student had tipped her off…

IT’S one of the things we are most afraid might happen to us. We go to great lengths to avoid it. And yet we do it all the same: We marry the wrong person. Partly, it’s because we have a bewildering array of problems that emerge when we try to get close to others. We seem normal only to those who…

Dan Dalton / BuzzFeed I'm 20 miles into a 33-mile drive through the winding roads and stunning scenery of the Galloway Forest National Park when I begin to wonder why Scotland's National Book Town is so difficult to get to. As the sun cuts between firs and roads weave through lochs, I conjure an…

Photo Credit Getty Images Phys Ed Gretchen Reynolds on the science of fitness. Some forms of exercise may be much more effective than others at bulking up the brain, according to a remarkable new study in rats. For the first time, scientists compared head-to-head the neurological impacts of…

Sure, Justin Bieber has made mistakes. The monkey. The mop bucket. A few historical desecrations along the way. Then he spent all of last year telling us he was sorry. (Though it turns out he didn’t mean sorry so much as… Well, we’ll let him explain.) Now he’s found a better way to make up with the…

M att, a father in his early 40s with soulful eyes, thinning hair and a ready smile, is doing his best to explain why he has a more intense relationship with his son than he does with his daughter. Over a mojito at a bar in Brooklyn, near the flat he shares with his wife and two children, he admits…

T wo years after the kidnapping, in April 2015, a 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck Nepal, affecting more than a quarter of the country’s people. A second earthquake quickly followed. Most of the initial deaths took place in Kathmandu and the surrounding valley. But when I visited the brick kilns…

We’ve reached the point in the Great American Story where thinking about doing things is basically like doing them. Giving advice over the internet is easy. I have done it anonymously, under my own name, and under the guise of Grandma Jim, for some reason, in various places. Men are particularly…

When your apartment doubles as your office, a workday can decay into a deserted arena for rival compulsions. Eventually you need to be among people again. That’s why I head to the movie theater at weird hours, seeking some semblance of ceremony. One ticket buys the ability to be privately public.…

I ARRIVED ON GOTLAND, an island 200 kilometers south of Stockholm in the Baltic Sea, late in the afternoon at the end of March. From the airplane window I saw tall pine trees, mist. Toy cars chugged through brown farmlands along black ribbons of road. I picked up my car, a red Volvo, from a local…

Chance events play a much larger role in life than many people once imagined. Most of us have no difficulty recognizing luck when it’s on conspicuous display, as when someone wins the lottery. But randomness often plays out in subtle ways, and it’s easy to construct narratives that portray success…

Employee Said Mahmoud adds chicken to the lunch buffet at Jasmin Alsham restaurant in Malmö.Photograph: Malin Palm for the Observer When Fisal Abo Karaa stepped off the train in Malmö’s central station this time last year, exhausted after a long journey by train and boat, he looked like any other…

Illustration: Greg Kletsel In Hollywood, the tweets and email alerts from industry trades trumpeting the announcements of superstar actors and showrunners attached to flashy TV projects roll out with almost numbing regularity now: Susan Sarandon and Jessica Lange team up for FX, Amy Adams heads to…

A FRIEND of mine complains about how many of the men she meets on Tinder use corporate language to chat her up. First, they “reach out.” Then, after spending the night together, they “follow up.” This kind of flirting is banal, but it makes sense. We constantly use economic metaphors to describe…

Albert Einstein ’s first job was a low-status assistant clerk in an office, allowing him to devote free time to pursue his real passion, theoretical physics. He had a string of published science papers, and came up with his Theory of Relativity during off hours. The artist Jackson Pollock worked as…

Share this Share this... Facebook In the summer of 1994, I was assigned a job that no man had ever done before: to be the first online travelling reporter for MTV.com. My assignment was to go on the Lollapalooza tour, take photographs on the first Apple digital camera, write daily tour journals and…

I can’t believe how jealous I am of Tony Hawk. He is three months younger than me. He was the world champion of skate boarding for 12 years in a row. He’s sold a billion dollars worth of video games. But that’s not why I am jealous of him. Every single day since he was 11 years old, he’s done what…

Britney Spears performing at Jones Beach Theater in Wantagh, N.Y., in 2000. Credit G. Paul Burnett/The New York Times By and Joe Coscarelli LAS VEGAS — The disturbing images seem so distant now: the pop-star-turned-cautionary tabloid tale — head shorn, face twisted, umbrella gripped like a police…

Pamela Elliott was the new sheriff in town. But instead of law and order, she brought chaos. by Mon, May 2, 2016 at 9:29 am CST The first thing she noticed was Sheriff Pamela Elliott standing across the street. It was an August evening in 2014, and Rachel Gallegos had just gotten home for a meeting…

Ausaf Abbas in Alien Kulture, left, before he became an investment banker.Photograph: Alan Powdrill for the Guardian Ausaf Abbas, 55 Then: bass player, Alien Kulture Now: investment banker We very much believed in the philosophy of punk – here’s a chord, here’s a second, here’s a third, now go and…