The Atlantic

The Not-So-Secret Key to Emotional Balance

Crying can help you keep your feelings in check. It’s also inextricably bound up in spirituality.
Source: Jan Buchczik

How to Build a Lifeis a column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Click here to listen to his podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life.


A of mine whom I recently lost spent most of his life near the Severn River in Maryland. The Severn is technically a “tidal estuary”—a brackish inlet off the Chesapeake Bay, where salt water mixes with fresh. “It’s the most human river,” my friend once told me. “It has the precise salinity of human

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from The Atlantic

The Atlantic5 min read
The Strangest Job in the World
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here. The role of first lady couldn’t be stranger. You attain the position almost by accident, simply by virtue of being married to the president
The Atlantic8 min readAmerican Government
The Return of the John Birch Society
Michael Smart chuckled as he thought back to their banishment. Truthfully he couldn’t say for sure what the problem had been, why it was that in 2012, the John Birch Society—the far-right organization historically steeped in conspiracism and oppositi
The Atlantic3 min readDiscrimination & Race Relations
The Legacy of Charles V. Hamilton and Black Power
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here. This week, The New York Times published news of the death of Charles V. Hamilton, the

Related Books & Audiobooks