The Curse of Being Over-Connected

Sociologist Dalton Conley shares a story about backpacking through Europe when he was 18. He writes, “I had no iPhone. ... I couldn't Google. ...

Don’t Do the Silent Treatment

Life for a 19th-century sailor was hard: Months at sea were accompanied by constant danger and deprivation. To make matters worse, mariners saw the same ...

Kids Learn to Tune Out Noise

If you are heading into Manhattan off the George Washington Bridge, you can't miss the cluster of four 32-story apartment buildings built right over ...

Procrastinators Helped by Using ‘Monk Mode’

Cameron Perrin, a 26-year-old software engineer, talks about his experience with the productivity hack known as "monk mode:"

As a person who ...

Finland Promotes Silence as Natural Resource

One icy night in March 2010, 100 marketing experts piled into the Sea Horse Restaurant in Helsinki. They had the modest goal of making a remote and medium-sized ...

Persevering Air Traveler Rewarded with Empty Plane

Conventional wisdom says that good things come to those who wait. That axiom rarely applies, however, to the drudgery of domestic air travel as most people ...

Bono on Silence and Surrender

Music icon Bono, lead singer of the popular band U2, tells the Atlantic magazine that lately God has been leading him to desire silence and listen to ...

More Americans Are Choosing to Be Alone

The COVID-19 pandemic wreaked havoc on our social lives. Time spent with friends went down. Time spent alone went up. According to the Census Bureau’s ...

Why Being Ghosted Hurts

We all have an ongoing fear of being ghosted. Ghosting is now so common that it was added in February of 2017 to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. It describes ...

New Year’s Resolution: Rediscover Boredom in the Smartphone Age

Smartphones have changed the way we inhabit public space and more specifically, how we fill our time while waiting. Consequently, day-dreaming, thinking, ...