I run when I need to clear my mind.\u00a0 The pandemic has been good to me in only one way\u2014it has increased my running and, with it, my time alone for uninterrupted thinking. Left to its own devices, though, my brain can run itself ragged hopping down one unproductive rabbit hole of worry after another.\u00a0 To help, I\u2019ve been filling my runs with podcasts that make me happy, or at least help me think about things differently.<\/p>\n
I started this journey with Jill Lepore\u2019s The Last Archive<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0 Lepore is an archivists\u2019 dream\u2014she is a lover of facts, of records, and of uncovering and telling good stories.\u00a0 \u201cWho killed truth?\u201d is the premise of The Last Archive<\/em>.\u00a0 Spoiler alert\u2014there is plenty of blame to go around, but the first Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, Oveta Culp Hobby, deserves a good deal of credit for creating one of today\u2019s biggest messes\u2014wide-scale resistance to government mandated vaccinations.\u00a0 If you want to know more about Hobby (and grow to resent her as much as I do), try searching for her in OneSearch<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n The Last Archive<\/em> is distributed by Pushkin Industries.\u00a0 Leaving aside wide-scale Polar Bear resentment of Malcolm Gladwell\u2014some of us still haven\u2019t forgiven him for his \u201cFood Fight\u201d podcast that took aim at Bowdoin Dining<\/a>\u2014I do appreciate Pushkin, which Gladwell co-founded.\u00a0 They seem to have an uncanny ability to produce and distribute podcasts that fit the bill for me\u2014digestible, accessible, smart, and inspiring.<\/p>\n My go-to podcast throughout the pandemic has been Dr. Laurie Santos\u2019s The Happiness Lab<\/em>.\u00a0 Santos is a Yale professor of Psychology whose class \u201cPsychology and the Good Life\u201d and its adaptation \u201cThe Science of Well-Being\u201d for Coursera have smashed enrollment records, and \u201cchanged the lives of thousands of people.\u201d\u00a0 Santos unpacks the science around happiness, and, through personal stories and cutting-edge scientific research, helps her listeners understand we might be looking for happiness in all the wrong places.\u00a0 As a habitual glass-half-empty-er, I\u2019m not sure listening to her podcast has actually made me happier.\u00a0 However, what I can say is that its lessons about reframing challenges have proved indispensable for navigating the pandemic and all the chaos it has wrought. Whenever my running brain wanders to sad places these days, I pull up Santos\u2019s series on Happiness Lessons of the Ancients<\/em><\/a> to listen one more time to the stories of Buddha\u2019s second arrow and of the Stoic gods who are challenging us all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I run when I need to clear my mind.\u00a0 The pandemic has been good to me in only one way\u2014it has increased my running and, with it, my time alone for uninterrupted thinking. Left to its own devices, though, my brain can run itself ragged hopping down one unproductive rabbit hole of worry after another.\u00a0 … <\/p>\n