Death is on my mind a lot.

Having lost all of my grandparents early in life, I don’t know what it’s like to be an adult and lose someone. I fear the day death introduces itself to my family, but I know it’s an inevitability.

In one of Ryan Holiday’s Daily Stoic correspondences — an email sharing stoic wisdom — he says:

“Too often there is far too great a disparity between what we say we feel and how we act on those feelings. It’s only after the sudden loss of a friend that we realize we had been taking them for granted, for instance.”

We need to say more of how we feel before it’s too late. What a terrible feeling it must be to realize we hadn’t shared our true thoughts with our loved ones.

It can be difficult to love yourself when you’re infiltrated with images of beautiful people and success stories of influencers all day long.

And yet social media apps are built to be addictive — and they work. American adults spend an average of 11 hours per day consuming media, 2.2 hours of which are social.

I am publishing a children’s book. It’s a story about a little girl who learns about values through the arrival of different animals to her family’s hobby farm.

Since publication of the first book in 2011, the Neapolitan Novels have made their way into the highest echelon of modern literature. The tetralogy was written by Elena Ferrante, a pseudonymous author who was said to be born in Naples, Italy in the early 1940s.

Over the course of four books, which begins with L’amica geniale, or My Brilliant Friend in its English translation, this series tells the story of the complex relationship between two women as they navigate the tumultuous terrain of postwar Italy, women’s rights, factory uprisings, and the savage Neapolitan neighborhood in which they grew up.

I found myself immediately addicted to the story, and so strong was my attachment to the novels that I put off reading the final book for several months because I wasn’t ready to part with the characters yet.

This series is brilliant. Here’s why: