Pema Chodron. When things fall apart-heart advice for difficult times. 2026

I wanted this book to be wrong. Desperately.

I knew what it was going to ask me to admit if it was right, and I wasn't ready to admit it, so for the first thirty pages I fought Pema Chödrön the way you fight someone you already suspect is telling you the bitter truth. I was hoping, genuinely hoping, that a Buddhist nun who'd spent decades studying the human mind had simply gotten it wrong this time. But Pema kept talking, and you could hear from her voice that she'd clearly made peace with everything she is saying. Even that bothered me. Here's the sentence that started the argument. She says the things falling apart in your life are not a malfunction. That the ground was never solid to begin with; you were never actually standing on anything, you'd just gotten remarkably good at not noticing. She says the anxious, ungrounded feeling you're trying so hard to fix is not a problem to be solved. It's just what it feels like to be a person, accurately, for once, without the usual padding. I did not want to hear that. I wanted solutions. I wanted five steps. I wanted someone to hand me the ground back. Pema, gently, yet infuriatingly, refuses. And it took me embarrassingly long to realize that refusal is the entire gift of this book. Pema has this idea, unconditional friendship with yourself, and it sounds soft until you actually try to practise it, and then you realise it might be one of the hardest things a person can do. To meet your own fear, your own shame, your own spiralling 2 am thoughts, not with another wave of self-improvement, but with something closer to how you'd sit with a frightened child: I see you. I'm not going anywhere. She tells a story about a woman who kept having nightmares about monsters chasing her, invading her space. She tries everything to get rid of them: yelling at them, barricading the door, and trying to analyze them. Nothing works, until one night, exhausted, she turned around, looked the monsters in the eye, and said, I see you. You're not going away, so let's see what you have to teach me. And the monsters froze. They had no idea what to do with someone who stopped running. I read that over and again because I knew exactly which monsters she was talking about. I have a few of my own that have been very comfortable chasing me for years, precisely because I never once turned around. And then there's the line that I think about more than almost anything else I've read: nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know. I didn't want that to be true either. I wanted things to just go away, old grief, old patterns, old fears, through sheer avoidance, if necessary. But avoidance, it turns out, is just a very elaborate waiting room. The thing doesn't leave. It just keeps tapping you on the shoulder, in slightly different outfits, until you finally look at it. I need to tell you about the audiobook, too. I listened to it recently, late at night, read by Christy Meyer, and something about receiving these ideas as sound instead of text undid me in an entirely new way. I lay there in the dark and listened and felt a particular quality of quiet settle inside me, which is rare for me, and which Pema Chödrön somehow manages to produce from well beyond the page. This is the book I keep returning to, not because I've mastered anything inside it. I very much have not. I still resist. I still want the five steps some days. I still, on the bad ones, run from the monsters instead of turning around to meet them. But every single time I come back to these pages, something in me recognizes the voice, the way you recognize an old friend who never once asked you to be anything other than exactly what you are in that particular moment. What this book does to me, every time, is remind me that falling apart was never the emergency I assumed it was. That there's a way to be here, fully inside the mess, without needing the mess to become anything other than what it already is. I don't know if I'll ever stop disagreeing with parts of it. I also don't know if I'll ever stop coming back to it. And right now, that's the only endorsement that actually matters. Not what I believed after the first thirty pages. What I do when things fall apart. I reach for this book. Every single time. BOOK: https://amzn.to/4zk3UZn

Ryushun Kusanagi's The Practice of Not Reacting - Buddhism - 2026

I didn't realize I was a reactor until I read this book. Then I saw it everywhere, in my racing thoughts, my clenched jaw, my habit of replaying conversations I wish I'd handled differently.

found me at the right time. I was tired. Not physically tired, but the kind of tired that comes from carrying the weight of every small frustration, every perceived slight, every moment I let someone else's mood dictate my own. I didn't have words for it. I just knew I was exhausted. Then I read this book. And I felt seen. Kusanagi, a Buddhist monk, writes with the clarity of someone who has spent years sitting with his own mind. He offers a simple but profound insight: hardship is part of life, but suffering is a choice. It is not what happens to us that disturbs the heart, it is the desires, aversions, and judgments that arise in the mind. When we stop reacting, the mind settles and we find peace. That sounds simple. It is not. But Kusanagi does not ask you to be perfect. He asks you to practice. To notice. To observe your reactions without getting swept away by them. He writes that reactions are like waves in the ocean, they arise and pass. The goal is not to stop the waves, but to stop being pulled under by them. I started practicing. Not perfectly. Not consistently. But I started noticing. I noticed the tightness in my chest when someone said something that stung. I noticed the spiral of thoughts that followed. I noticed the stories I told myself, about what they meant, about what it said about me. And I started letting those stories go. Not all of them. But enough. The practice has not made me peaceful. It has made me aware. And awareness, as Kusanagi writes, is the beginning of freedom. This book is brief, but it is not shallow. It is the kind of book you read in one sitting, then return to again and again. It is not a book to be consumed. It is a book to be lived. Three Lessons (from the book, through the lens of my experience): 1. Suffering is not what happens to you. It is how you respond to what happens. I used to think my stress was caused by external events. Now I see that it is caused by my reaction to them. The events will happen. I get to choose whether I add suffering to them. 2. Reactions are habits. And habits can be unlearned. I have been reacting the same way for years. The book showed me that these reactions are not who I am. They are patterns. And patterns can be changed. 3. The one who can watch their own mind is the one who is free. This is the most important lesson I am still learning. Observing my reactions without getting caught up in them, without judging myself for having them, is the beginning of freedom. Read this if you are tired. Read this if you want to stop being ruled by your emotions. Read this if you are ready to practice, not perfectly, but honestly. Ryushun Kusanagi has written a book that is both a mirror and a guide. It reflects the patterns you have been carrying, and it points you toward a different way. It will not solve your problems. But it will change how you relate to them. And that, I am learning, is everything. BOOK: https://amzn.to/4xhr8he

PLATO AND THE TYRANT, acclaimed historian and classicist James Romm draws on personal letters of Plato—documents

Plato is one of history’s most influential thinkers, the “sublime philosopher” whose writings remain foundational to Western culture. He is known for the brilliant dialogues in which he depicted his teacher, Socrates, discussing ethical truths with prominent citizens of Athens. Yet the image we have of Plato—an ethereal figure far removed from society and politics, who conjured abstract ideas in peaceful groves—is a fiction, created by Plato’s admirers and built up over centuries. In fact, Plato was very much a man of the world. In

that have long been kept in obscurity—to show how a philosopher helped topple the leading Greek power of the era: the opulent city of Syracuse. There, Plato encountered two authoritarian rulers, a father and son both named Dionysius, and tried to steer them toward philosophy. At the same time, he worked on his masterpiece, Republic, in which he conceived a ruler who unites perfect wisdom with absolute power. That dream has echoed down through the ages and given rise to a famous term, one that Plato himself didn’t actually use: philosopher-king. Combining thrilling political drama with explorations of Plato’s most cherished ideas, Romm takes us into the heart of Greece’s late classical age, a time when many believed that democracy had failed. Plato’s search for solutions led him to write his fervent plea for a new political order, and also led him to a place where he believed his theories might be put into practice. But PLATO AND THE TYRANT demonstrates how Plato’s experiment with enlightened autocracy spiraled into catastrophe, and also gives us nothing less than a new account of the origins of Western political thought. Available now in paperback. https://wwnorton.com/books/plato-and-the-tyrant Jacket Design by Sarah Bibel

The Present colonizes the Past by Romila Thapar - third Kapila Vatsyayan Lecture -2026

In a time when any form of critical interrogations are bulldozed and penalized, well-researched and thoroughly evidenced histories are replaced by pop, fictionalized and manipulated histories, and educational institutions are violently attacked and reduced to breeding grounds of fascist propaganda, this book by Prof. Romila Thapar, an extended version of her Third Dr. Kapil Vatsayana Memorial Lecture that was delivered in 2025, in a very simple and straightforward way explains why celebrating unevidenced pop histories at the cost of erasing evidenced-based histories is not only dangerous, but is also a form of recycling the colonial patterns of expropriations and appropriations. Written in a very simple and lucid way, this book speaks to all.

"Mussolini's Ghost"-the afterlife of a dictator by Stephen Gundle - 2026

What happens when a dictator dies, but his influence lives on?

uncovers the surprising afterlife of Benito Mussolini, tracing his enduring presence through monuments, films, television, politics, and public memory. Drawing on cultural history and psychology, it reveals why Italy's Fascist past continues to cast a long shadow over the present: https://oxford.ly/4hkO3U6

The Hidden History of Conspiracy Theory by Andrew McKenzie-McHarg -2026

In

traces the genealogy of conspiracy theory, from Machiavelli through the “paranoid style” to QAnon. Now available worldwide! Learn more: https://hubs.ly/Q04tfRbX0 It seems as though there’s a conspiracy theory for every situation. But what exactly is a conspiracy theory? And why is the term used to describe beliefs that are so very unlike theories (at least in the scientific sense of the word)? In this erudite and original book, Andrew McKenzie-McHarg answers these questions not by formulating a definition but by tracing a genealogy. He uncovers two crucial strands of contemporary conspiracy theorizing on the threshold of modernity: on the one hand, political analysis as realized by Niccolò Machiavelli in such works as The Prince and, on the other, apocalyptic prophecy as channeled by the charismatic preacher Girolamo Savonarola. The French Revolution, the antisemitic hoax known as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and the Nuremberg Trials number among the subsequent episodes that progressively entangled these strands before finally knotting them into the twentieth-century concept of conspiracy theory. Alternative labels were also offered, most strikingly by the historian Richard Hofstadter, whose engagement with American right-wing politics in the 1950s and 1960s inspired his notion of the paranoid style. As McKenzie-McHarg shows, Hofstadter’s coinage, with its psychological bent, contributed to personalizing our understanding of conspiracy theory, thus yielding a specific type of person that, for better or worse, has become all too familiar to us today: the conspiracy theorist. Proceeding from The Prince through The Protocols to the paranoid style and then beyond to QAnon, The Hidden History of Conspiracy Theory sheds new light on a complex and troubling phenomenon.

Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay-the Art of Freedom by Nico Slate 2026

I have a rather fond memory of Kamala, the beautiful craft store that once stood on Ho Chi Minh Sarani in Kolkata. I remember being fascinated by its sarees, textiles and crafts from different parts of India. Perhaps many older Kolkatans will remember the store; for those who don't, Kamala was one of those places that quietly introduced the richness of India's handmade traditions to an urban audience. As a teenager, I naturally assumed that the woman behind the name, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, was Bengali. Much later, I discovered that she was born in Mangalore into a Chitrapur Saraswat family and acquired the surname Chattopadhyay through her marriage to Harindranath Chattopadhyay, the younger brother of Sarojini Naidu. What I discovered about the woman herself was far more fascinating. At Independence, India's handloom and craft traditions were facing a serious crisis. Colonial economic disruption, shrinking patronage, industrialisation and changing markets had left countless craftspeople struggling to sustain their livelihoods. Kamaladevi understood that political freedom had to be accompanied by cultural and economic self-reliance. As the first chairperson of the All India Handicrafts Board, she worked to bring India's crafts back into the economic and cultural life of the new nation—building institutions, creating markets, encouraging design and, above all, restoring dignity to the artisan. But she never believed that revival meant simply reproducing the past. In 1964, she said: “Craftsmanship need not, however, be bound up wholly with tradition.” It could draw strength from the past, while responding to the present and creating new traditions. How relevant that sounds today. We have just observed National Handloom Day, followed by Independence Day. We are once again talking about handloom, khadi, handmade, sustainability and self-reliance. Kamaladevi reminds us that these are not new fashionable ideas. For her, the handmade was deeply connected to economic independence, dignity of labour, cultural self-respect and human creativity. She even spoke of the “right kind of spoon”—how an ordinary object, when made with sensitivity and understanding, could give us a pleasure beyond mere utility. And that, perhaps, is the essence of a truly beautiful handwoven saree. It is not simply cloth made without a machine. It carries the intelligence of the weaver, the character of the material, the rhythm of the loom and generations of accumulated knowledge. Kamaladevi did not ask India to choose between tradition and modernity. She asked us to make tradition live. And perhaps that is her most relevant message today. If we genuinely want handloom to survive, we cannot merely romanticise it. We have to make it relevant, desirable, creatively alive and economically viable for the people who create it. So when I think of the Kamala I knew as a teenager, I realise that I was not merely remembering a beautiful store. I was remembering a small, tangible expression of the extraordinary vision of a woman who believed that India's future could be modern without turning its back on its hands. #ataleoftextilebyavijit #textiles #art #heritage #handloom #sarees #explore