“I was the defender of happiness when my books came out,” Ms. Salzberg said. “A number of people have been saying, ‘Why don’t you say ‘joy’?” Happiness was dismissed as purely the pursuit of pleasure, she said. But it is significantly more complex. “I like redeeming the idea and meaning around happiness, to have more clarity and deep understanding,” she said. “So people know what happiness actually is.”
Does Ms. Fetell Lee believe Americans are living in a post-happiness era? No, she said. But she has observed a shift. “I don’t think about happiness anymore,” she said. “I think about joy. And if you string together enough moments of joy, maybe you can have a happy life.”
Removing symbols that have a dark history doesn’t erase past wrongs, but it does acknowledge those harms and open the door for a better future: concepts that are understood by our local middle schoolers who have pushed to remove the name Stapleton from their school. Perhaps in this case, our future generation can influence the past.
How was Hitler able to turn a democratic nation into an autocracy organized around race-based hatred? In recent years, as much of the Western world has seen a notable, sometimes violent turn toward nationalism and anti-Semitism, that question has become one of broad, anxious interest. This fall, two new books seek answers: Longerich’s “Hitler: A Biography” and the Cambridge historian Brendan Simms’s “Hitler: A Global Biography.” Both were underway well before the tumult of current events, but both biographers recognize that recent political trends have made their subject especially charged.
Josh Kun wanted to document Los Angeles’ history through autographs, so he started in an obvious place: the signatures of the famous.
But then he went to an unexpected place: the streets, where he noticed the stories embedded in the graffiti, murals and gang tags across the city.