7 for Sunday

Everything inside your home — the furniture, the firewood, the people — is only temporarily inside. Pico Iyer reframes quitting as a step toward something rather than away. And somewhere in Los Angeles, a book lists 125,284 names, one for each person the government decided to incarcerate.

The words “you know what you should do” queue up in your throat — and the whole game is catching them before they escape. A short story about a professor’s office and too many cigarettes pulls you in before you’ve decided to read it. Philosophy turns out to be a conversation started millennia ago that you can still just sit down and join.

Schopenhauer says to treat human meanness the way a mineralogist treats an interesting rock. A Renaissance physician wants to know how the art of exercise got lost in the first place. Jake Gyllenhaal describes the unconscious as a river you’re already floating on. And the petulant child arrives with a list of grievances, which turns out to be useful data.

Benjamin Franklin’s genuinely strange idea — that ordinary people pursuing their own happiness would make society better — turns out to be still radical. Ibsen says living is warring with trolls. Someone takes empathy entirely apart, down to the diagrams, and isn’t sure how to reassemble it. Seth Godin has been trying to turn lights on since he was eighteen.