How to breathe together in these breathless times. — I grew up close to Newcastle, on the north east coast of England. Tough, mining country, straight out of the movie “Billy Elliot.” In the late 70’s, there were miners strikes, where we were subjected to power cuts and had to light our homes with candles and do our homework…

How to swim together in unprecedented times — A note to all the CEOs out there — it’s time to talk about sea otters. Sea otters are fascinating; critical animals in the marine ecosystem, they prowl the offshore kelp forests that grow along many coastlines and police the sea urchins and other herbivorous invertebrates such as snails and…

My father died over 10 years ago in a hospice in Northern England. I was living in California at the time and as it became clear that he was close to the end, I called to say I was getting on a flight to London the next day to come…

Helping a Third Culture Child find her way home — It happened in Fuxing Park a couple of years ago. A journalist from Beijing was interviewing me. She was keen for us to get out of the office, to walk and talk and have “culturally immersive” experiences that we could discuss. Fuxing Park (复兴公园) lies at the corner of Shanghai’s…

How people live without protein — April 2004, London I am sitting talking to Sean, a 17-year-old working-class kid from Handsworth, a notoriously tough area of Birmingham in the UK’s Midlands. His speech is strangely inarticulate and slurred, his accent heavy and laced with slang—original Jamaican patois mixed with English street. …

Icelanders tell me the land itself is a source of creative inspiration and, indirectly, happiness… if you are inclined to believe in energy vortexes and other such things, then Iceland is the country for you. — The Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner Reykjavík, Iceland, June 2013. The first word…