Author: Andrew Taggart

• February 16, 2011

  Clifford Saron on the positive effects associated with intensive meditative practice

  Last night I attended a talk given by Clifford Saron, Ph.D., an Associate Research Scientist at UC-Davis’s Center for Mind and Brain. The title of the talk was “Training the mind: A longitudinal investigation of intensive meditation, attention, emotion, and physiology.” Saron and his team of researchers have been studying the effects of deep contemplative practice…
• February 14, 2011

  Can I be happy as the world burns?

  I’m not sure what the question means. If it means, “Can I be happy even as the planet ceases to be a domicile for homo sapiens,” then the answer is clearly no. It is difficult to fathom what conception of happiness would allow for the extinction of life–my life included. (That is, provided that we limit…
• February 13, 2011

  Ian Brunskill on Montaigne’s art of living

  Ian Brunskill has written a fine review (“For a Little Room Behind the Shop” [American Interest, March/April 2011]) of Sarah Bakewell’s book on Montaigne, How to Live. Near the end of the review, he writes that Montaigne’s was “a productively detached kind of engagement with life.” Montaigne’s outlook, Brunskill concludes, is a “counterpoint to a media-driven, mediated modern culture…
• February 12, 2011

  On the ‘repeal of reticence’

  Rochelle Gurstein’s thoughts about the “repeal of reticence” have been swimming around in my head for months now. How could it be that we have become accustomed to sharing all our thoughts, desires, wishes, and fantasies with total strangers? And how did it come about that exposing the private lives of political figures could be…
• February 12, 2011

  Walter Russell Mead on The Art of War as a manual for living in the modern world

  In his American Interest blog entitled “Sun Tzu: The Enemy of the Bureaucratic Mind,” Walter Russell Mead provides an eloquent, prescient exposition of Sun Tzu’s seminal work. Near the end of the essay he writes, “The Art of War is a handbook for living in an uncertain and dangerous world.” Throughout, he stresses–rightly, in my opinion–that…