Inbar Lee Hyams

I'm in Pelion this week, in the mountains where the Greeks kept their centaurs. Chiron was born here — half man, half horse, and nothing like the rest of his kind, who were famous for getting drunk and starting fights. He was the gentle one. The one who knew which plant did what, who could set a bone and calm a child, and who raised half the heroes in Greek myth. Achilles grew up in his cave. Chiron's fate was a wound that would never close. The arrow came from a fight that wasn't his,...

We are terrible at knowing what other people are feeling, and the confidence we have about it makes no difference at all. Dr. Marc Brackett, who runs the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, told Mel Robbins on her podcast recently that how sure we feel about reading someone's emotions has almost no relationship to how accurate we turn out to be. What we call intuition is mostly our own story about the person, running quietly underneath the conversation and doing a very good impression of...

Moses spends the whole book of Deuteronomy telling people things they already know. He recounts the exodus to a crowd that walked out of Egypt. He gives the Ten Commandments a second time to a generation raised on the story of Sinai. Forty years of history, laws they have been living under for most of their lives, and in his final months he says all of it again, out loud, in order. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks noticed something that explains why. Deuteronomy is the book where love runs in both...