Who do you think you are? There are two answers
We tell children that they can be whatever they want to be. But philosopher Joanna Lawson, an assistant professor at Oklahoma State University, remembers the moment her piano teacher told her that, in fact, she could not plan to attend Juilliard and become a professional musician. According to Lawson, the answer to the question “Who are you?” involves differentiating between two types of identity: (1) metaphysical identity—the straightforward facts, “whether one is a firefighter or a schoolteacher, Christian or Muslim, Canadian or Swedish”—and (2) existential identity, which “has to do with deeper truths about a person’s self, their cares and values. This kind of identity is private and intimate.”
The Expert as Tourist
“Beverly Gage takes a road trip through historic sites from 1776 to today, discovering optimism for our political future along the way.”
Alice Kelly reviews This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History by Yale historian Beverly Gage, a book written as “a means of reckoning with the state of the nation on its semiquincentennial, the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.”
“. . . the road trip genre is reliable and familiar: a means of finding cultural identity and memory through a physical journey,” writes Kelly. “The journey is always fictional as much as literal, the seemingly haphazard journeying and narrative coincidences deliberately constructed and shaped by the author.”
Study explores how cultural tightness shapes personality and political beliefs
Cultural tightness refers to the degree to which a society has strong social norms and expects people to follow them closely. Tight cultures usually have strict rules about acceptable behavior and show relatively little tolerance for people who deviate from those expectations.
This paper reports that “[t]wo studies of cultural tightness found that people from culturally tighter U.S. states were more likely to endorse racial stereotyping and right-wing authoritarianism, and to have a higher need for certainty.”
A Debut Novel About Individual Agency in Apocalyptic Times
Mandana Chaffa, a writer, editor, and critic, reviews Paige Lewis’s debut novel Canon, “a modern epic about individual agency within the context of grim, nearly apocalyptic times; the lies and violence that “higher powers” exert upon us; and the truths we can only determine for ourselves.”
In this interview, author Paige Lewis tells Chaffa, “Binaries like good/evil often flatten our understanding of the world. And this flattening makes humans easier to deceive. Does anyone ever think they might be on the side of evil?”
Trauma: The Splintered Narrative
The grammar of trauma is different from the grammar of ordinary experience—and for writers who have survived extreme experiences, it becomes one of the most disorienting and generative discoveries of their creative lives: that the wound doesn’t just change what they have to say, but how language itself behaves in their hands.
Narrative identity theory posits that we create our sense of self by telling the story of our life experiences. But there’s a lot of insight in this piece about how trying to articulate traumatic experiences breaks language, how both words and narrative forms fail when we’re trying to say the unsayable.
“So there’s a question for a writer—to seek to mimetically represent an experience in its highest truth or to seek personal healing from writing. I personally like to think you can do both.”
Why older people are happier and what we can learn from them
“Around the world, happiness tends to peak later in life. It has more to do with balancing priorities than elderly wisdom”
research spanning 145 countries has identified a U-shaped happiness-age curve, whereby self-reported wellbeing tends to dip in mid-adulthood and peak in old age. Despite the functional deterioration (such as health decline, cognitive impairment) and other losses that often accompany ageing, older adults generally report being happier than do younger adults.
The two authors of this article, both life-span psychologists, attribute this change to a shift in the broad system of life goals: “Because older people are more keenly aware than younger people of their time being finite, maintaining social connections and enjoying life aren’t ‘distractions’ from more important work – these activities are their ‘work’ and primary life priorities.”
© 2026 by Mary Daniels Brown
