By Randy Rosenthal

In 2015, the statistical website FiveThirtyEight conducted a survey of the 25 most rewatchable movies of all time. The Princess Bride was number six — tied with The Godfather. It’s one of my very favorite films, and since it came out in 1987 I’ve watched it many, many times. But perhaps not as many as Ethan Nichtern.  A teacher in the Shambhala Buddhist tradition, Nichtern loves the movie so much he not only regularly quotes it in his Dharma talks, he wrote a book about the connections between the film and Buddhism, aptly titled The Dharma of “The Princess Bride.” Continue reading →

By Art Edwards

In Things that Happened Before the Earthquake, you won’t find pages-long excursions about the texture of the carpet under the main character Eugenia’s feet, or details on the exact grain of the wood paneling in a Topanga Canyon cabin, or whatever thread a lesser writer might get stuck on her tongue and drag the reader along in her attempts to spit it out. Chiara Barzini’s prose feels like conversation. You also shouldn’t assume from this that the author is one of those social networking denizens who managed to turn her penchant for frank online talk into a book-length manuscript, because that’s even further from the truth. The effect of Barzini’s prose hearkens back to a more open era — maybe the 1990s, the novel’s setting — when books felt more like long exchanges between friends (magically, since the exchange was one-sided), and the reader’s only job was to sit back and empathize. I won’t bludgeon you with my approach or waste your time, the prose implies. You can relax. Continue reading →

By Siel Ju

Be yourself; fake it ‘til you make it. Never give up; quit while you’re ahead. Rise and grind; treat yo’ self. In world full of contradictory platitudes, how does one figure out what to do, how to excel, who to become? When should one push herself for once, and when learn to take it easy already? Continue reading →

By Eric Gade

In the 17th century, new facts about the world presented a problem for natural philosophers. They had learned of droves of new animals from the New World, previously unknown in Europe, that must have survived the Great Flood. This begged the question: how did Noah’s Ark fit all of them? Several thinkers made honest attempts to resolve the issue, including sketching increasingly preposterous schematics of the ship itself, in addition to devising clever, logic-twisting tricks of taxonomy — based on no evidence whatsoever — that “explained” the ability of the Ark to do as was written. Even in their own time, it was easy to see the cracks forming in the story. But it should not be at all surprising that learned men clung so desperately to their frame of knowledge and history, wanting everything they knew as true to remain so. Continue reading →

By John Knight

Stephen Florida is an obsession. His body is a vehicle for conquering, the people around him are either useful or obstacles, and his mind churns, devouring everything that stands outside a single thought: “My name is Stephen Florida and I’m going to win the Division IV NCAA Championship in the 133 weight class. That’s it.” Continue reading →

By Glen Roven

I first met Willard Spiegelman in Los Angeles when he accompanied me on my many interminable drives from Santa Monica to my offices in Hollywood. He wasn’t there physically, but he certainly was a presence: his voice, narrating the Poetry Course from the Teaching Company — all 30-odd hours of it — was my constant companion for a month. Continue reading →