The existential balm of seeing yourself as a verb, not a noun
Clinical psychologist Eric Jannazzo discusses the realization that he “could start to imagine my personhood not as a thing but as a roiling together of body and breath, memory and mood, ceaselessly shifting thoughts and perceptions, all braiding with the rest of the world in a pattern that could never be repeated.”
“The language of death can be enormously confusing,” he continues. But thinking of ourselves not as a thing, a fixed object, but rather as a “miraculous harmony of processes – eating, laughing, noticing, forgetting – that one day stopped happening” can help us come to terms with it.
A History of Existential Anxiety
“From medieval theology to modern philosophy, dread has long been a guide for living ethically.”
Feeling worried about how to live your life? Creeping sense of dread got you down? Scholars often identify anxiety as a distinctly modern issue, associated with existentialist thinkers, particularly Danish theologian and philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. But Paul Megna, a scholar of literature and philosophy, argues that Kierkegaard was “a modern practitioner of a deep-historical, dread-based asceticism” with roots in ancient religious ideas.
A 120-year timeline of literature reveals distinctive patterns of “invisibility” for some groups
This article reports on research recently published in the journal Current Research in Ecological and Social Psychology: “A comprehensive analysis of English-language literature published over the last century reveals distinct patterns in how race and gender intersect within written text.”
individuals who do not fit the prototypical stereotypes . . . are often overlooked or marginalized. Because they do not align with the dominant gendered stereotypes of their racial groups, they may become less visible in cultural representations.
Further, “the study offers new insights into how cultural stereotypes are preserved and challenged over time. . . . The findings also highlight the potential of social movements to alter widespread cultural narratives.”
Early life adversity may fundamentally rewire global brain dynamics
A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reveals that early life adversity predisposes the adult brain to a state of heightened activity and alters how it responds to threats later in life.
The research discussed here was done on mice because it could not be done on humans for ethical reasons. Nonetheless, I found it informative because childhood trauma has become a staple in psychological mysteries and thrillers.
Childhood Friends, Not Moms, Shape Attachment Styles Most
Here’s scientific support for the importance of our childhood friendships:
“In general, if you had high-quality friendships and felt connected to your friends in childhood, then you felt more secure in romantic relationships and friendships at age 30,” Dugan [lead researcher Keely Dugan, assistant professor of social personality psychology at the University of Missouri] told Scientific American. “When you have those first friendships at school, that’s when you practice give-and-take dynamics,” she added. “Relationships in adulthood then mirror those dynamics.”
6 Moody, Atmospheric Novels That Explore Womanhood and Societal Expectations
One of the most basic determinants of who we become is social expectations. Novelist Rebecca Hannigan writes about her debut work, Darkrooms, which features two women who “are difficult in their own ways; as vulnerable as they are spiteful, and as wounded as they are vindictive, and neither fit into their communities. I’m interested in how society itself can be difficult for women, with all the expectations of who we should be and what our lives should look like.”
Here she offers a list of novels that “tackle ideas of what it is to move through the world as a woman.”
Polyamory, regrets and revenge: changing the story on infidelity
In The Guardian, Erin Somers, author of The Ten Year Affair, writes about several novels that deal with infidelity:
Each generation writes their own novels of domestic repression. As millennials settle into marriage, and as those marriages fray, we will surely only see more. The millennial version tends to explore new relationship models, with polyamory emerging as a big theme, an idealised fix-all for the problem of monogamy that ends up creating problems of its own.
She thinks that “the enduring appeal of the genre . . . has to do with ever-evolving perspectives on longing, ageing and fear of death.”
How the NY Post and the NY Daily News Turned Victims Into Criminals
On December 22, 1984, Bernhard Goetz shot four black teenagers on a New York City Subway train in Manhattan after they allegedly tried to rob him. All four victims survived, though one, Darrell Cabey, was paralyzed and suffered brain damage as a result of his injuries.
—Source: Wikipedia
In this excerpt from her book Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage, historian Heather Ann Thompson addresses how written reports and public opinion can work together to “spin” or “control the narrative.”
© 2026 by Mary Daniels Brown
