Hope and Optimism

The big, unknowable questions in life are seductive, but without small, trivial questions as insulation, those large mysteries can consume us.

80% of adults are overly optimistic about life—where does that cognitive bias come from?

Why do first-world ailments get cured faster than global health crises? Because Big Pharma doesn’t serve sick people, it serves rich people—let’s change that.

Some anxieties are essential, and for millennia they kept our ancestors alive. But there’s another type of anxiety that we can actually do away with—and it’s defeated via hope.

The Actors’ Gang Prison Project has spent ten years proving that teaching prisoners self-worth and emotional intelligence pays off.

Hope is not as soft or as passive an emotion as we think. Here’s how ‘The Shawshank Redemption’ can teach us the philosophy and function of hope as a response to possibility.

Can you have hope in the face of death? For believers this is somewhat easier, but non-theists require a different set of philosophical tools.

RIP pessimists, we barely knew you. Carnegie Mellon University’s Professor Michael Scheier explains the impact your outlook has on the world inside of you, from your cells to your psychology.

Cornel West talks about everyday poets, being the best of the human species, hope, what wokeness really means, and revolution.

Kyle Maynard is a photographer, wrestler, and inspiration machine. Here’s how he pursued his passion and helped others along the way.

In the summer of 1969, America did the extraordinary. Let’s do it again.

For the last two years the volume has risen on populist voices, culminating in a victory for President Trump. The day after his election, this is how “rude” New Yorkers treated one Muslim-American woman.