Category: explore

Six TED Talks for Creatives

TEDs are a great source of inspiration as a meeting ground for ideas. They’ve launched a number of careers for some really great thinkers and problem solvers. I’ve compiled a list of TED Talks for creatives, those of us who write, make art, or just want to live creatively through our jobs and even daily ...

How I Live a Contented Life Through Daily Engagement

I’ve settled on the realization that joy and contentment in life are about engagement with our everyday rituals. A few days ago I had a conversation with a friend about this and we agreed that being intentional with our most basic decisions is hugely important to overall quality of life. The pandemic has forced me ...

The Met’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s website—metmeseum.org—now hosts a free, educational virtual archive dedicated to over 8,000 works of art that span global history. This collection offers a chronology of artworks based on region of origin and era as well as essays and a digital gallery of the entire collection with drop-down filters. Left to right: ...

Exploring NYC’s “Little Paris” Neighborhood

Wedged between Soho, Chinatown and Nolita, Centre Street from Broome and Grande St. is now considered Manhattan’s “Little Paris”. A very much up-and-coming neighborhood, the newly dubbed district (with its own signage) offers a place to get authentic croissants, champagne, artisan scents, shop French brands and even learn the language. I recently explored the area, ...

Martha Beck uses The Divine Comedy as an Allegory for Finding Authenticity

Martha Beck’s book The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self illustrates how honesty and freeing ourselves from cultural expectations opens up our lives to our true nature. The book is structured around Dante’s The Divine Comedy, using Dante’s journey down into the Inferno, up the Mount of Purgatory, and eventual rise ...

This YouTube Series is the Ultimate Charming Escape

Mental health experts have recommended limiting the time we spend online and watching television during quarantine. By the time I took this advice to heart, I had already scoured all of YouTube, but- lucky for you- I managed to find the best new web series out there. Doing it Ourselves is about a family renovating ...

London, Now and Then

My first impression of London, when I stepped off the Heathrow-Express at Paddington Station, was that it didn’t sound like London. I heard accents and languages from many other countries, but the British accent, which had been trained into my American mind via television and film, blended in among the many tourists and migrants from ...

In Honor of International Women’s Day, My Favorite Scene From My Favorite Czech New Wave Film

Most are probably familiar with the 1960s French New Wave film movement popularized by Jean-Luc Godard. Around the same era there was a similar movement happening in Czechoslovakia, when films arose with loose narrative structures and absurd situations. Pioneer female filmmaker Věra Chytilová made Daisies in 1966 about two teenage girls behaving badly. The film ...

Bookish in Manhattan: Favorite Libraries and Bookstores

I’ve been to New York City a number of times with family, friends, and groups. These trips have always been a lot of fun and memorable, but there is so much to do in New York and the only way I could make an itinerary around the things that I wanted to do, without compromise, ...

NYD’s Top 8 Posts of 2018

It’s interesting to go back and compare my posts from year to year, allowing me to take inventory of how Neptune Your Dial evolves and potential changes for the coming year. This year, I noticed a shift in content as well as a clearer idea of what I want this blog to represent. I have ...