Essays
In Praise of Being Slightly Bored
Boredom is not an emergency. It may be the last undeveloped land in the modern mind.
By Clara Voss
Ideas
Every Ideas story, newest first.
All Stories
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Essays
The Handwritten Letter Is Not Coming Back. It Never Left.
People keep predicting the end of the post. People keep writing to each other anyway.
By Clara Voss
Essays
What Gardens Teach Us About Waiting
Nothing in a garden can be hurried, which may be precisely what makes it so unsettling in 2026.
By Clara Voss
Essays
The Strange Comfort of Other People's Routines
Why do millions of us watch strangers making their beds? An answer about loneliness, and hope.
By Clara Voss
Essays
On Walking Home the Long Way
A short defence of the unnecessary detour, and of a mind left to its own devices.
By Clara Voss
Interviews
The Woman Who Listens to Glaciers
Acoustic scientist Sigrid Halvorsen spends her working life recording ice, and she says it has never been noisier.
By Clara Voss
Interviews
Forty Years of Fixing Violins
A master luthier on patience, wood and why the instruments often know more than the players do.
By Clara Voss
Interviews
The Chef Who Went Back to School at Sixty
After a lifetime of restaurant kitchens, Marguerite Lund is finally studying the science of what she always did by instinct.
By Clara Voss
Interviews
A Conversation With the World's Last Globe Maker
Hand-painted globes take months to make and now fetch thousands. Their maker explains the appeal.
By Clara Voss
Interviews
What a Crossword Setter Knows About the Human Mind
For thirty-one years, Edmund Vale has been deliberately misleading people before breakfast.
By Clara Voss
