Tragedy has always been strangely attractive. From Greek and Shakespearean tragedy to opera and film, people hunger for tales of pain, loss, and misery. But why do we value ugliness? Why is labor born of suffering so much more real than labor born of happiness?...

We are creatures of time, yet in a much deeper way, we are creatures of narrative. We're bound by memory in the past, by sensation in the moment, but it's in the future that our imagination truly comes alive. That's where we put our desires, hopes, and fears. But...

Here's a question that actually makes you wonder: are you who you are bound up in your memories? To ask seems to be at the very root of what it means to be human. I mean, memories aren't really histories of what occurred, are they? They're the bricks of everything,...