For a year, Helen Eveleigh and a fellow member of the Auroville Community in South India inquired about kindness among other community members in interviews and sharing circles. They learned that “kindness is so intrinsic to life that we don't even see it.” They found that an anonymous kind...
Clay Christensen was the starting center on his university's varsity basketball team. They had fought all season to reach the British championship finals. Then he learned the game was scheduled for Sunday — his Sabbath. When he told his coach he couldn't play, the response was swift: "I...
A Dutch writer is reviving "dusking" -- the nearly forgotten practice of pausing to watch the day fade into darkness -- and in doing so, offering something quietly radical to a world that has forgotten how to be still. Once common among farming families in the Netherlands who gathered to mark the...
Matthew Stone, who was living in a tent with his dog in the woods of a central Illinois city, was among the first 55 residents to move into Bloomington’s first shelter village. A fully enclosed campus with a bathhouse and community center and 48 tiny sleeping cabins, The Bridge can accommodate 56...
In 1968, Sisters Berta Sailer and Corita Bussanmas were teaching at a Catholic elementary school. “One day, a mom said to us, we need a place for our small kids. And we were young and stupid and said, well, small kids can't be a problem.” They opened their doors, and fixed breakfast for a few...
At five, Neha Kirpal was told not to brush her teeth because her mother believed the toothpaste was poisoned. Her mother had schizophrenia, and for years their home was a place where reality shifted without warning—furniture barricaded against doors at night, fights that sent her brother hiding...
It was an "utterly unfun experiment to be part of," recounts Cortland Dahl with a smile. "But it was also very illuminating." Lying in a brain scanner, participants in this research study were subjected to scalding water piped through a small thermode on their wrists -- at regular intervals over...
A packed room in Paris gathers not to reach consensus, but to practice something rare in today's world: disagreeing well. At the Night of Controversies, over 600 people engage in structured debates on divisive topics like border abolition and environmental authoritarianism, where participants...
A former pilot trades the cockpit for nursing homes, spending 100 days with people living with dementia. Outside the nursing home, Vienna's sights and sounds buzz by as Michael rides his Vespa — construction sites, traffic lights, the city's relentless pace. Inside the facility, time...
When researchers witnessed a sperm whale birth in the Caribbean, they discovered something remarkable: for three hours after the calf emerged, every whale in the pod took turns keeping the negatively buoyant newborn afloat -- even those with no genetic relationship to the mother. The footage...