2026-03-21 03:44:50
“Lights and shadows are continually flitting across my inward sky, and I know neither whence they come nor whither they go; nor do I inquire too closely into them,” Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote in his notebook one spring day in 1840. “It is dangerous to look too minutely into such phenomena. It is apt to create a substance where at first there was a mere shadow… It is best not to strive to interpret it in earthly language, but wait for the soul to make itself understood.”
A century after him, the French philosopher Simone Weil — another visionary of uncommon insight into the depths of the soul — contemplated the paradox of friendship, observing that “it is a fault to wish to be understood before we have made ourselves clear to ourselves.”
For one consciousness to understand another — to understand what it is like to be another — might be the supreme challenge of communication and coexistence, because we each move through life half-opaque to ourselves. We aim the analytical mind — that magnificent novelty-instrument millennia in the evolutionary making — at the opacity, but occluding the lens of self-understanding is something much more primeval: Emotion smudges the eyepiece of life, often without our awareness, changing what we see and making us react not to what is but to what we are perceiving. Anyone with moderate self-awareness can relate to the experience of having an irritable or indignant or melancholy mood descend upon them seemingly out of the blue, when it has in fact coalesced out of an invisible and pervasive atmosphere of unprocessed feeling: Who among us has not, in a human moment, aimed a flash of fury at the wrong person for the wrong thing because something entirely else is filling the sky of the mind with its charged nimbus of wrongness.
Why emotion so easily clouds the lens of experience is what psychiatrist trio Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon explore throughout A General Theory of Love (public library) — the altogether revelatory book that remains, in my life of reading, the single most illuminating inquiry into the neurological nature and psychological nurture of why we feel what we feel and how this shapes how we become what we are.
Drawing an analogy to music — which might be so elemental to our sense of aliveness precisely because it shares a fundamental neuropsychological mechanism with emotion — Lewis, Amini, and Lannon examine the composition of feeling out of neural notation, illuminating the interdependence of and difference between emotion and mood:
Emotions possess the evanescence of a musical note. When a pianist strikes a key, a hammer collides with the matching string inside his instrument and sets it to vibrating at its characteristic frequency. As amplitude of vibration declines, the sound falls off and dies away. Emotions operate in an analogous way: an event touches a responsive key, an internal feeling-tone is sounded, and it soon dwindles into silence. (The figures of speech “pluck at one’s heartstrings” and “strikes a chord in me” have found a home in our language for just this reason.) Rising activity in the emotion circuits produces not sound, but (among other things) a facial expression. When the neural excitation exceeds a shadowy threshold of awareness, what emerges is a feeling — the conscious experience of emotional activation. As neural activity diminishes, feeling intensity decreases, but some residual activity persists in those circuits after a feeling is no longer perceptible. Like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, an emotion appears suddenly in the drama of our lives to nudge the players in the proper direction, and then dissolves into nothingness, leaving behind a vague impression of its former presence.
Against this haunted backdrop of feeling, the dance of mood plays out, twirling us into tumult with its persuasive percussion:
Moods exist because of the musical aspect of an emotion’s neural activity, the lower portion imperceptible to our conscious ears… A mood is a state of enhanced readiness to experience a certain emotion. Where an emotion is a single note, clearly struck, hanging for a moment in the still air, a mood is the extended, nearly inaudible echo that follows. Consciousness registers a fading level of activation in the emotion circuits faintly or not at all. And so the provocative events of the day may leave us with emotional responsiveness waiting beneath our notice… Since the neural activation that creates a given emotion decreases gradually, provoking it again is easier within the window of the mood.
By these imperceptible pulsations and resonances, our present experience comes to reverberate with echoes of the past:
A musical tone makes physical objects vibrate at its frequency, the phenomenon of sympathetic reverberation. A soprano breaks a wineglass with the right note as she makes unbending glass quiver along with her voice. Emotional tones in the brain establish a living harmony with the past in a similar way. The brain is not composed of string, and there are no oscillating fibers within the cranium. But in the nervous system, information echoes down the filaments that join harmonious neural networks. When an emotional chord is struck, it stirs to life past memories of the same feeling.
[…]
A particular emotion revives all memories of its prior instantiations. Every feeling (after the first) is a multilayered experience, only partly reflecting the present, sensory world.
Over the sweep of time, our lived experience thus rewires the brain, generating a forceful momentum of emotional habit. What we have felt comes to shape what we most easily and readily feel, unstringing the harp of reality. We come to perceive the world not as it is but as we are. At the heart of this reality-discord are what Lewis, Amini, and Lannon term Limbic Attractors — pre-conditioned patterns of interpretation of incoming sensory data, densely networked and deeply ingrained in the limbic brain, activated so reflexively and powerfully that they can obscure and overwhelm the raw signal of reality.
Limbic Attractors are the source of the blindness that makes us so opaque to ourselves, but they are also a portal to transcending our own limitations by linking up to other minds, sympathetic and sonorous with different feeling-tones. Through such mutual harmonics — nowhere more powerful than in the limbic linkage we call love — we can recompose our own patterned soundtrack of emotion:
Because human beings remember with neurons, we are disposed to see more of what we have already seen, hear anew what we have heard most often, think just what we have always thought. Our minds are burdened by an informational inertia whose headlong course is not easy to slow… No individual can think his way around his own Attractors, since they are embedded in the structure of thought… Because limbic resonance and regulation join human minds together in a continuous exchange of influential signals, every brain is part of a local network that shares information — including Attractors.
[…]
Through the limbic transmission of an Attractor’s influence, one person can lure others into his emotional virtuality. All of us, when we engage in relatedness, fall under the gravitational influence of another’s emotional world, at the same time that we are bending his emotional mind with ours. Each relationship is a binary star, a burning flux of exchanged force fields, the deep and ancient influences emanating and felt, felt and emanating.
In any such binary star system, this limbic resonance allows two people to harmonize their Attractors, fine-tuning the respective musical tones that most easily flow from each consciousness — Pythagoras’s music of the spheres and Kepler’s celestial harmonics, right here on Earth, in the infinite universe of the human heart:
In a relationship, one mind revises another; one heart changes its partner. This astounding legacy of our combined status as mammals and neural beings is limbic revision: the power to remodel the emotional parts of the people we love, as our Attractors activate certain limbic pathways, and the brain’s inexorable memory mechanism reinforces them. Who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love.
Complement this fragment of the altogether illuminating A General Theory of Love with poet Ronald Johnson on matter, music, and the mind, then revisit José Ortega y Gasset on how our loves shape our character and George Saunders on breaking our patterns to unbreak our hearts.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2026-03-20 12:46:59
These passages appear on pages 126-127 of Traversal in the context of Mary Shelley’s life.
Where does love go when it goes?
It is a common question, contrived in its commonness yet savagely sincere, bellowing in the bosom of every brokenhearted lover, reverberating through the body of every civilization’s love songs and sonnets, radiating from cave drawings and dive bar graffiti. It is also a peculiar question, lexically and syntactically, for it presupposes two things about the life of the heart: a movement and a destination, as if love rose to its feet one day and headed for an elsewhere, left without a map, got lost, lost to seasons and cycles, lost like the mammoth and the human dorsal fin and the surnames of millennia of daughters. It feels like nothing less than a violation of the universe—how love alone can defy the first law of thermodynamics, how this most immense energy of being can simply dissipate into the oceanic austerity of time.
We build the sandcastles of our loves and fancy them fortresses of granite, then watch bewildered as the waves of our inconstancy lap them away, along with the footprints of the builder. Each love we love and unlove alters the way we walk through life, alters the trajectory of our traversal along the shoreline of the self. The only constant is that we go on walking, that we remain pilgrims of possibility. We would not walk if we had already arrived. We would not write if we had already arrived. Out of our incompleteness and our disorientation, out of our longing and our wanderlust, arises the motive force of every love and every revolution, of our science and our art, of our creation and our self-creation. Every creative act is an act of traversal.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2026-03-20 03:40:40
I met Willow at a loom on a farm one late-summer day. She was amused that I thought she looked like Mary Shelley, in whose world I’d been immersed for seven years while writing Traversal. Neither of us knew who the other was — Willow turned out to be the co-founder of the wonderful and necessary Atmos, devoted to reenchanting humanity with the rest of nature.
I had just led a workshop based on my bird divinations and Willow had so delighted in the process that I suggested we apply it to an ethos we discovered that we share: We both love science — that is, the wonder-smitten human passion for truth, for understanding how nature works, for peeling back the curtain of mystery to glimpse tiny dazzling fragments of reality — and we both believe that human nature is a fractal of that same magnificent mystery, with parts of us as remote as the outer reaches of the Solar System, as fathomless as the depths of the Mariana Trench, and just as interesting to explore. And we vehemently disagree with Keats, who indicted Newton for “unweaving the rainbow” — taking the magic out of nature with science. No: Science only magnifies the magic.
Each weekend since the day we met, we have been taking one science news article and letting the words in it come loose, come alive, arrange themselves into whatever the unconscious wants to say to the mind, then exchanging what emerges: poems, koans, subterranean currents of thought and feeling that over and over surprise us, invite us into deeper conversation with each other and with ourselves, delight us with what staggeringly different things two minds can make of the same material, yet how kindred in underlying spirit.
We started out doing it only in text, but as a lover of natural history and astronomical art from the golden age of scientific illustration, I eventually offered to lay out our divination over restored images from centuries-old books I love, just as I had done with the bird divinations, each becoming a kind of one-page picture-book.
Six months in, we decided to share our weekly adventures in language, wonder, and the secret wisdom of the heart on a new free Substack, separate from The Marginalian and separate from Atmos: Every Saturday, we publish the divination we each made from a piece of science news as an artwork, which we are making available as a print and other tangibles (including field notebooks, greeting cards, and tote bags), and donating the proceeds to The Nature Conservancy.
Although this practice remains pure play, it has become a lovely way to loosen the ligaments of our formal writing and equip our prose with particles of the poetic. We encourage you to try it yourself as you follow our ongoing adventures on Substack.
For a taste of what to expect, here are some of our favorite divinations from the first six months:
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2026-03-20 03:16:05
In recent seasons of being, I have had occasion to reflect on the utterly improbable trajectory of my life, plotted not by planning but by living.
We long to be given the next step and the route to the horizon, allaying our anxiety with the illusion of a destination somewhere beyond the vista of our present life.
But the hardest reality to bear is that death is the only horizon, with numberless ways to get there — none replicable, all uncertain in their route, all only certain to arrive. This is why there are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives. And this is why each and every one of them, even the most seemingly actualized, trembles with a staggering degree of doubt and confusion. Uncertainty is the price of beauty, and integrity the only compass for the territory of uncertainty that constitutes the landmass of any given life.
And so the best we can do is walk step by next intuitively right step until one day, pausing to catch our breath, we turn around and gasp at a path. If we have been lucky enough, if we have been willing enough to face the uncertainty, it is our own singular path, unplotted by our anxious younger selves, untrodden by anyone else.
The recovery community has a shorthand for keeping this at the center of awareness in times of inner tumult: “Do the next right thing.” The concept, in fact, originated two years before the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous, in a lucid and largehearted letter Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung (July 26, 1875–June 6, 1961) wrote to an anonymous correspondent, included in Selected Letters of C.G. Jung, 1909–1961 (public library).
On December 15, 1933, Jung responded to a woman who had asked his guidance on, quite simply, how to live. Two generations after the young Nietzsche admonished that “no one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life,” Jung writes:
Dear Frau V.,
Your questions are unanswerable because you want to know how one ought to live. One lives as one can. There is no single, definite way for the individual which is prescribed for him or would be the proper one. If that’s what you want you had best join the Catholic Church, where they tell you what’s what. Moreover this way fits in with the average way of mankind in general. But if you want to go your individual way, it is the way you make for yourself, which is never prescribed, which you do not know in advance, and which simply comes into being of itself when you put one foot in front of the other. If you always do the next thing that needs to be done, you will go most safely and sure-footedly along the path prescribed by your unconscious. Then it is naturally no help at all to speculate about how you ought to live. And then you know, too, that you cannot know it, but quietly do the next and most necessary thing. So long as you think you don’t yet know what this is, you still have too much money to spend in useless speculation. But if you do with conviction the next and most necessary thing, you are always doing something meaningful and intended by fate. With kind regards and wishes,
Yours sincerely,
C.G. Jung
Two months later, in another gesture of generosity and wisdom, Jung deepens the sentiment in a letter to a man who had reached out in abject anxiety and distress, feeling that he had, quite simply, mislived his life. Jung writes:
Dear Herr N.,
Nobody can set right a mismanaged life with a few words. But there is no pit you cannot climb out of provided you make the right effort at the right place.
When one is in a mess like you are, one has no right any more to worry about the idiocy of one’s own psychology, but must do the next thing with diligence and devotion and earn the goodwill of others. In every littlest thing you do in this way you will find yourself. [Everyone has] to do it the hard way, and always with the next, the littlest, and the hardest things.
Yours truly,
C.G. Jung
Complement with a poignant, poetic lens on how to live and how to die and Darwin’s deathbed reflection on what makes life worth living, then revisit Jung on life and death, his rare BBC interview about human nature, and the story of how he and his improbable physicist friend Wolfgang Pauli invented the concept of synchronicity.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2026-03-19 21:47:56
Shortly after I began the year with some blessings, a friend sent me Lucille Clifton’s spare, splendid poem “blessing the boats.” We had met at a poetry workshop and shared a resolution to write more poetry in the coming year, so we began taking turns each week choosing a line from a favorite poem to use as a joint prompt. (The wonderful thing about minds, about the dazzling variousness of them, is what different things can bloom in them from the same seed.)
I had been thinking about forgiveness — about its quiet power to dislodge the lump of blame from the thorax of time and fill the lung of life with the oxygen of the possible, about how you bless your own life when you forgive your mother, forgive your father, forgive the person for whom your love was not enough, forgive the person for whom your love was too much, forgive yourself, over and over and over.
This is the poem that unfolded in me from Clifton’s opening line, read here by Nick Cave (who has written beautifully about self-forgiveness and who sparked my season of blessings by taking me to church, for the first time, the morning of my fortieth birthday).
FORGIVENESS
by Maria PopovaMay the tide
never tire of its tender toil
how over and over
it forgives the Moon
the daily exile
and returns to turn
mountains into sand
as if to say,
you too can have
this homecoming
you too possess
this elemental power
of turning
the stone in the heart
into golden dust.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2026-03-19 07:49:09
Bertrand Russell (May 18, 1872–February 2, 1970) endures as one of humanity’s most lucid and luminous minds — an oracle of timeless wisdom on everything from what “the good life” really means to why “fruitful monotony” is essential for happiness to love, sex, and our moral superstitions. In 1950, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for “his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought.” On December 11 of that year, 78-year-old Russell took the podium in Stockholm to receive the grand accolade.
Later included in Nobel Writers on Writing (public library) — which also gave us Pearl S. Buck, the youngest woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, on art, writing, and the nature of creativity — his acceptance speech is one of the finest packets of human thought ever delivered from a stage.
Russell begins by considering the central motive driving human behavior:
All human activity is prompted by desire. There is a wholly fallacious theory advanced by some earnest moralists to the effect that it is possible to resist desire in the interests of duty and moral principle. I say this is fallacious, not because no man ever acts from a sense of duty, but because duty has no hold on him unless he desires to be dutiful. If you wish to know what men will do, you must know not only, or principally, their material circumstances, but rather the whole system of their desires with their relative strengths.
[…]
Man differs from other animals in one very important respect, and that is that he has some desires which are, so to speak, infinite, which can never be fully gratified, and which would keep him restless even in Paradise. The boa constrictor, when he has had an adequate meal, goes to sleep, and does not wake until he needs another meal. Human beings, for the most part, are not like this.
Russell points to four such infinite desires — acquisitiveness, rivalry, vanity, and love of power — and examines them in order:
Acquisitiveness — the wish to possess as much as possible of goods, or the title to goods — is a motive which, I suppose, has its origin in a combination of fear with the desire for necessaries. I once befriended two little girls from Estonia, who had narrowly escaped death from starvation in a famine. They lived in my family, and of course had plenty to eat. But they spent all their leisure visiting neighbouring farms and stealing potatoes, which they hoarded. Rockefeller, who in his infancy had experienced great poverty, spent his adult life in a similar manner.
[…]
However much you may acquire, you will always wish to acquire more; satiety is a dream which will always elude you.
In 1938, Henry Miller also articulated this fundamental driver in his brilliant meditation on how money became a human fixation. Decades later, modern psychologists would term this notion “the hedonic treadmill.” But for Russell, this elemental driver is eclipsed by an even stronger one — our propensity for rivalry:
The world would be a happier place than it is if acquisitiveness were always stronger than rivalry. But in fact, a great many men will cheerfully face impoverishment if they can thereby secure complete ruin for their rivals. Hence the present level of taxation.
Rivalry, he argues, is in turn upstaged by human narcissism. In a sentiment doubly poignant in the context of today’s social media, he observes:
Vanity is a motive of immense potency. Anyone who has much to do with children knows how they are constantly performing some antic, and saying “Look at me.” “Look at me” is one of the most fundamental desires of the human heart. It can take innumerable forms, from buffoonery to the pursuit of posthumous fame.
[…]
It is scarcely possible to exaggerate the influence of vanity throughout the range of human life, from the child of three to the potentate at whose frown the world trembles.
But the most potent of the four impulses, Russell argues, is the love of power:
Love of power is closely akin to vanity, but it is not by any means the same thing. What vanity needs for its satisfaction is glory, and it is easy to have glory without power… Many people prefer glory to power, but on the whole these people have less effect upon the course of events than those who prefer power to glory… Power, like vanity, is insatiable. Nothing short of omnipotence could satisfy it completely. And as it is especially the vice of energetic men, the causal efficacy of love of power is out of all proportion to its frequency. It is, indeed, by far the strongest motive in the lives of important men.
[…]
Love of power is greatly increased by the experience of power, and this applies to petty power as well as to that of potentates.
Anyone who has ever agonized in the hands of a petty bureaucrat — something Hannah Arendt unforgettably censured as a special kind of violence — can attest to the veracity of this sentiment. Russell adds:
In any autocratic regime, the holders of power become increasingly tyrannical with experience of the delights that power can afford. Since power over human beings is shown in making them do what they would rather not do, the man who is actuated by love of power is more apt to inflict pain than to permit pleasure.
But Russell, a thinker of exceptional sensitivity to nuance and to the dualities of which life is woven, cautions against dismissing the love of power as a wholesale negative driver — from the impulse to dominate the unknown, he points out, spring such desirables as the pursuit of knowledge and all scientific progress. He considers its fruitful manifestations:
It would be a complete mistake to decry love of power altogether as a motive. Whether you will be led by this motive to actions which are useful, or to actions which are pernicious, depends upon the social system, and upon your capacities. If your capacities are theoretical or technical, you will contribute to knowledge or technique, and, as a rule, your activity will be useful. If you are a politician you may be actuated by love of power, but as a rule this motive will join itself on to the desire to see some state of affairs realized which, for some reason, you prefer to the status quo.
Russell then turns to a set of secondary motives. Echoing his enduring ideas on the interplay of boredom and excitement in human life, he begins with the notion of love of excitement:
Human beings show their superiority to the brutes by their capacity for boredom, though I have sometimes thought, in examining the apes at the zoo, that they, perhaps, have the rudiments of this tiresome emotion. However that may be, experience shows that escape from boredom is one of the really powerful desires of almost all human beings.
Illustration by Olimpia Zagnoli for Mister Horizontal & Miss Vertical by Noémie RévahHe argues that this intoxicating love of excitement is only amplified by the sedentary nature of modern life, which has fractured the natural bond between body and mind. A century after Thoreau made his exquisite case against the sedentary lifestyle, Russell writes:
Our mental make-up is suited to a life of very severe physical labor. I used, when I was younger, to take my holidays walking. I would cover twenty-five miles a day, and when the evening came I had no need of anything to keep me from boredom, since the delight of sitting amply sufficed. But modern life cannot be conducted on these physically strenuous principles. A great deal of work is sedentary, and most manual work exercises only a few specialized muscles. When crowds assemble in Trafalgar Square to cheer to the echo an announcement that the government has decided to have them killed, they would not do so if they had all walked twenty-five miles that day. This cure for bellicosity is, however, impracticable, and if the human race is to survive — a thing which is, perhaps, undesirable — other means must be found for securing an innocent outlet for the unused physical energy that produces love of excitement… I have never heard of a war that proceeded from dance halls.
[…]
Civilized life has grown altogether too tame, and, if it is to be stable, it must provide harmless outlets for the impulses which our remote ancestors satisfied in hunting… I think every big town should contain artificial waterfalls that people could descend in very fragile canoes, and they should contain bathing pools full of mechanical sharks. Any person found advocating a preventive war should be condemned to two hours a day with these ingenious monsters. More seriously, pains should be taken to provide constructive outlets for the love of excitement. Nothing in the world is more exciting than a moment of sudden discovery or invention, and many more people are capable of experiencing such moments than is sometimes thought.
Complement Nobel Writers on Writing with more excellent Nobel Prize acceptance speeches — William Faulkner on the artist as a booster of the human heart, Ernest Hemingway on writing and solitude, Alice Munro on the secret to telling a great story, and Saul Bellow on how literature ennobles the human spirit — then revisit Russell on immortality and why science is the key to democracy.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.