“Memento Morbid”: new podcast series from Morbid Anatomy

Click here to listen to any of the first 14 episodes of Memento Morbid, a new podcast series from our friends at Morbid Anatomy: Fascinating, poignant, and surprisingly life-affirming conversations about death, the human condition, and life’s great mysteries.Join Joanna Ebenstein, founder of Morbid Anatomy, for Memento Morbid, a series of surprisingly life-affirming conversations around topics that tend … Read more“Memento Morbid”: new podcast series from Morbid Anatomy

“Mail Between Heaven and Earth: On Japan’s Post Office For Letters to the Dead”

Sally Hayden writes for the Literary Hub: The road wound upwards, past a sloping graveyard and cedar trees. We passed another hamlet of houses, and I started to spot various signs pointing towards the drifting post. Through a final flurry of trees, it at last became visible. There was a rectangular yellow post box—the “real” … Read more“Mail Between Heaven and Earth: On Japan’s Post Office For Letters to the Dead”

“The Little Book of Maudism” (2016)

I can’t recall the first time I saw the countercultural classic movie Harold and Maude, but I’m sure that I was too young then to pick up on the film’s bittersweet, positive existentialist message except in very broad strokes. Sometime around 2020 – peak pandemic – I became aware that English author Lucy Coleman Talbot … Read more“The Little Book of Maudism” (2016)

Floralia 2026

Living in the future … the first wildflowers are appearing in the park and along the riverbanks, trees are budding or starting to leaf, and so another Floralia has arrived. I’ve repositioned the skull on my vanitas shrine – facing to the right, symbolizing “looking forward” – and re-dressed the flowered caplet in honor of … Read moreFloralia 2026

Memento Mori Religion in “28 Years Later”

In the 28 Days franchise, much of the world is laid to waste by an accidentally-released pathogen called the Rage Virus, which reduces human beings to almost mindless biting and eating machines. The third installment is set 28 years after the original movie and takes place in a radically re-wilded England. Nature has largely reclaimed … Read moreMemento Mori Religion in “28 Years Later”

“After the Rain”

Japanese conceptual artist Aya Kichi describes “After the Rain”: (…) incorporating a series of optical prisms into the centres of tombstones, which as a result, create a spectrum of light on the ground where the grave would be situated. Influenced by rainy days and the grieving process, the project takes these elements and translates them … Read more“After the Rain”

“… the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts …”

“Her finely-touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good … Read more“… the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts …”