With some communities in rebooted lockdown conditions and movement restricted everywhere else, no one is posting pictures of their sourdough. Zoom cocktail parties have lost their novelty, Netflix can ...

We have a vast palette of words that attempt to express our downcast moods — "a funk," "the blues," "the doldrums." All of them abstractions, euphemisms we employ in an effort to pinpoint something ...

The vice of "acedia," often translated as "sloth," can cause laziness, but it is much more than that; it is a lack of caring for anything and being bored with everything, even one's relationship with ...

Kathleen Norris' latest nonfiction book is an attempt to resurrect a term that fell out of use in the fourth century: acedia. The word might have died, but the state of being it describes is very much ...

Summers are hot and arid along the southern coast of Turkey. Sparkling blue waters of the Mediterranean makes the heat more bearable, but the terrain remains rough along the hills and water-carved ...

People who are trapped by sloth are usually prisoners of either the future or the past. Their soul does not live in the present, which it finds burdensome. Instead, it tries to root itself in a time ...

I spent this summer unemployed after a layoff. I hadn’t exactly loved my job, but nor had I expected to be unceremoniously booted from it. It wasn’t a crisis, really—I’ve been a freelancer of some ...