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John Kaag

  • None, What Is Called Thinking Substack
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Articles

An American Prophet of the Natural World

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By John Kaag
| The American Scholar Verified
The Glorians: Visitations from the Holy Ordinary by Terry Tempest Williams; Grove Atlantic, 336 pp., $28.00 In the early months of 1836, a 33-year-old Ralph Waldo Emerson sat in the Old Manse in Concord, gazing down the hill to the Concord River where the Old North Bridge had been swept away by a storm. It was there that he drafted Nature, an essay he hoped would be a spiritual “shot heard round the world.” Concord had been the birthplace of the American Revolution.
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Think, Again - The American Scholar

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By John Kaag
| The American Scholar Verified
Traversal by Maria Popova; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 608 pp., $36 Over the years, I’ve come to regard reading a challenging book as a test of self-selection. In the course of turning the pages, the question surfaces: “Am I the sort of person who should, can, or will finish this book?” I asked this several times as I worked through Maria Popova’s latest, the weighty and aptly titled Traversal—as in n. the crossing and mapping of a long and formidable range.
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A New Understanding of Human Beings’ Most Basic Desire

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By John Kaag
| Süddeutsche Zeitung Verified
Philosophers are generally expected to display wisdom and calm in the face of existential questions. I am just not one of those philosophers. I spent 30 years racing away from these thoughts by running and swimming obsessively, pretending that I had no physical limits. Certain evasions are bound to fail: At 40, I suffered a cardiac arrest after an ill-advised treadmill workout.
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