Mariam Vahradyan writes for Psyche: Many cultures around the world actively maintain relationships with the dead through storytelling, prayer and ritual. In Japan, for example, the spirits of the dead are welcomed during the Obon festival. For four days each year, families remember their ancestors by tending to graves, lighting small fires, and making offerings. … Read more“Why you should talk to your dead ancestors”
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”
Based on the bestselling novel by Max Porter, Grief is the Thing with Feathers.
Ashley Belanger writes for Ars Technica: As artificial intelligence has advanced, AI tools have emerged to make it possible to easily create digital replicas of lost loved ones, which can be generated without the knowledge or consent of the person who died. Trained on the data of the dead, these tools, sometimes called grief bots … Read more“How to draft a will to avoid becoming an AI ghost—it’s not easy”
Amy Kurzweil and Daniel Story write for Aeon on the questions raised by interactive LLM AI simulations of deceased people: These apps and algorithms are part of a growing class of technologies that marry artificial intelligence (AI) with the data that people leave behind. These technologies will become more sophisticated and accessible as the parameters … Read more“Chatbots of the dead”
Author Joanna Ebenstein discusses her life’s work and her new book Memento Mori: The Art of Contemplating Death to Live a Better Life in this episode of the Alta Live podcast.
Shayla Love writes for The Guardian: In many ways, the renaissance in psychedelic research was born from the studies on terminal cancer patients at Johns Hopkins and New York University (NYU). The writer Michael Pollan covered one such study in the New Yorker, and his subsequent book, How to Change Your Mind, shot up bestseller … Read more“The end-of-life patients finding solace in magic mushrooms”
Part of my morning ritual walk, which is undertaken partly for exercise, partly as a kind of moving meditation practice, is to navigate this stretch of several hundred feet of shoreline adjacent to the local river. Because of its position, slightly downstream of the point where two branches of the river meet, tree trunks washed … Read moreWalking the boulder field
A heads-up that death doula Alua Arthur’s new book may be pre-ordered via this link: Briefly Perfectly Human: Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End.