Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

My grandmother, the silent film star Ramona Langley When my grandmother came to stay for the holidays, she would sweep up the driveway in a champagne-colored car with huge tail fins. Wearing rhinestone-studded sunglasses and an ancient fur coat, she’d spring from the car and shout, “Darlings! I’m here!” And then proceed to turn the…

So yesterday I was making my rounds of the shops in downtown Seville, collecting last-minute essentials such as gift tags and stocking stuffers. I was buzzing along towards store number five, thinking that I was doing pretty well, when I glanced down and realized that I had the last store’s plastic shopping basket slung over…

A Christmas card photo from our Ohio years One December, while having lunch in Seville with a British friend, I mentioned that I’d just finished composing my annual holiday letter, and he looked at me in astonishment bordering on horror. “You actually do one of those?” he said. “Well, yeah. It’s a great way to…

Bambi’s mother, killed by hunters, in the Disney film During my long-ago vegetarian phase, I visited friends in Alabama and happened to be seated next to an avid hunter at a dinner party. He talked in a sweet, lazy drawl about his father showing him how to stalk, kill, and skin animals in the woods,…

Our guest house in the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan So I’m with friends hiking in the Himalayas, and we run into a Buddhist monk who is climbing up to a monastery where he will spend the next eight years in silent meditation . As our guide explains this, Rich grabs some of the monk’s stuff,…

Parents have a hard time enforcing clothing standards when local girls are wearing outfits like this to church. “So what do you think?” a rookie expat asked me this morning. “Should I let my two daughters, aged fourteen and seventeen, go off on their own, taking the bus from Seville to Granada?” Parents bringing teens…

“Edgy” and “outrageous” aren’t words I usually use to describe religious-themed holiday figurines, but a few days ago, strolling around a street market in Seville, I was gobsmacked by some of the latest offerings. If you don’t happen to live in a Mediterranean country, you may not know that here, an event as important as…

I had no idea what they were plotting… “I don’t want to make a big deal out of it,” I said to Rich and two friends some years ago en route to Nantucket. “In fact, let’s just pretend I’m not even having a fortieth birthday this weekend.” “Fine, great, no problem,” they all said. “No…

“You can’t buy happiness,” an American woman once told me. “But you can put a down payment on it.” If you’re looking for ways to invest in your own happiness, you’ll find it pays to focus on experiences, rather than things, according to San Francisco State University researchers. “The study,” reported Science Daily , “demonstrates…

Great road stories often make me want to grab the author by the lapels and exclaim, “Are you insane ?” But in a good way. Take George Mahood, a perfectly normal chap who decides to set off on a 1000-mile journey penniless, without luggage, and naked except for a pair of boxer shorts emblazoned with…