This is Joe's World

How much do you REALLY know about polar bears? If we want to save animals at risk around the world, we have to celebrate how magnificent they are! Come along with us on a breathtaking journey to the top of the world to experience how the largest land predator on Earth lives their lives!

Lumbering, rolling, and frolicking over the arctic sea ice is the world’s largest land predator. With translucent fur, webbed feet, and weighing in at over a thousand pounds, these creatures have fascinated us since we first laid eyes on them. So, we’re traveling to the top of the world with a few storytellers who show us a different side of the famous bears of the north: the polar bear!

By Sam Burns


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Poet and writer, Ron Hobbs, has explored life from many angles and has the stories to prove it. He writes, Many years later I was working on a tramp-steamer that had pulled into Haiti. I hiked off on my own to learn the island. It was hot and mid-afternoon and I thirsted. I saw an old woman working her garden. Ma'am. Ma'am! Excuse me. I'm a stranger here and I am thirsty. Could I please have a drink of water?


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Are you weird? Do other people seem weird to you? That's a good thing, argues author Olga Khazan.

The experience of feeling different or unusual is familiar to many, and I know it well. Growing up as the daughter of a Jewish father and Christian mother who both became Baha’i, and the only white kid in a group of friends who were all first-generation immigrants, I also later married my South Asian partner, raising our biracial child between two continents.

By Jenara Nerenberg


“Immersion in difference is my norm,” I’ve written elsewhere. In adulthood, I discovered that there really were sensory differences I experienced that made my inner life very different from others’, something I write about in my book Divergent Mind.

In her new book, Weird, Olga Khazan dives into various identities that can set a person apart, from religion and race to sexuality and socioeconomic class. As a self-defined poor Russian immigrant Jew growing up in small-town Texas, Khazan experienced life in a way tha…

"Millions of recovering addicts the world over can trace their spiritual lineage back to the Mayflower Hotel. Back to the exact moment when the psyche of the Western world slipped a cog, to the sliver of a choice of one man, when inevitable destruction, despair, and eventual death enveloping the world of alcoholics jumped into what Bill Wilson would come to describe as a fourth dimension. Back to when the desperation of powerlessness exploded into hope." What follows is an article that shares the remarkable story of A.A. co-founder Bill Wilson.


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Sara Algoe, Ph.D., explains a practice to help you feel more appreciation for your partner.

By Jane Park

What does a piece of paper have to do with human nature? Well, why not ask the craftsmen who have been mastering the craft of papermaking for generations! (Who knew we held the key to happiness in our hands so often?)

Inside of a 400-year-old mill in the UK, Jim Paterson, Neil Hopkins, and their single apprentice create a paper that looks nothing like the pile you slid into your printer. It’s uniquely textured, measured with a precise, masterful eye, and perfectly imperfect in every way. But their work is about way more than just making paper, and how they describe the process of bringing paper to life will leave you thinking about your own work with fresh eyes!

By Sam Burns


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Do you ever wonder how a basketball player can stand at the free throw line with the game in his hands in front of 30 million viewers and casually sink a shot? How about when a surgeon is in the middle of a procedure and the patient starts to bleed profusely, or when a lawyer has to convince a jury that her innocent client isn't guilty of murder? How do they keep their heads?Graham Betchart, the director of mental training at Lucid Performance, prepares people for these exact moments.


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Contentment—the knowledge that things are OK exactly as they are, right now—is highly valued by many cultures.

By Daniel Cordaro


It was 2014, and my research team—including the GGSC’s Dacher Keltner—was studying a remote group of former nomads high in the Himalayas of Eastern Bhutan. This was a place that no outsider had ever traveled to before, and we were about to make first contact with one of the three last uncontacted villages on planet earth. We traveled through the jungle, hiked down a mountain, forded a river, and then hiked up another mountain to a little settlement of about 200 families who had been living there since who knows when.

With a single laptop charge, we conducted the final piece of a five-year study to identify the human emotions that are universal across cultures. We brought a long list of potential universal emotions—from shame to joy to embarrassment—to see if they could be recognized by people who had no experience with the outside world. That means no electrici…

Does all that stretching, turning upside down, and breathing really do anything? Why do people think yoga is so great? What kind of benefits can the average, unflexible, person get from yoga? Why not ask an average, unflexible dad what he thinks after doing it for 30 days?

It’s been marketed as a sort of ancient cure-all for everything from our aches and pains to our mental wellbeing in recent decades, but can yoga really have all of the benefits people are raving about? Is it really worth our time? Regular-dad Craig not-super-flexible-but-recently-started-running Benzine tests it out for us!

By Sam Burns


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"The Benedictine-Camaldolese monk, Bruno Barnhart says it very well: We humans prefer a manageable complexity to an unmanageable simplicity.

A complex instability is our typical default setting. Restless with where and how and who we are, we think we need to be somewhere else, or live some other way, or be someone else."

David Mckee


We dream up all sorts of alternative versions of our lives and of our selves, and pursue them, without paying real attention to where and how and who we actually are.  We expend great effort in trying to get “there,” while what we most need to work at is trying to  get “here”…feeling safe and secure in the simple, unmanageable, groundless depths of our own hearts.

And then there is that complex inhospitality that we so often busy ourselves with.  In our efforts to control our experience, we put up all manner of complicated walls, visible and invisible shields, subtle barriers and defenses, all in the effort  to guard ourselves; to protect oursel…

Let's not forget what we learned from going through a pandemic.

A lot of people I know have been starting to wonder about life after the shelter-in-place orders have been lifted. What will it be like? What will the new normal be?

By Jill Suttie


The answers to those questions will depend a lot on where you live, what your experience has been like, and what you make of it all.

Living in a city that imposed shelter-in-place orders 10 weeks ago, as of this writing, my own life has been a mixed bag. I shifted to working at home pretty easily, but it’s been hard finding a routine and avoiding distractions. I’m connected with friends online, but I miss their physical presence. Plus, my sleep and mood have suffered as anxiety looms over the future of our society.

I don’t want to negate these feelings or ignore our losses. But, as a writer for Greater Good, I can’t help but see some positives coming from this crisis, too. Reflecting on this moment has been a learning opportunity for me and for…

"Moral reckonings are being driven to the surface of our life together: What are politics for? What is an economy for? Jacqueline Novogratz says the simplistic ways we take up such questions -- if we take them up at all -- is inadequate. Novogratz is an innovator in creative, human-centered capitalism. She has described her recent book, 'Manifesto for a Moral Revolution', as a love letter to the next generation." More in this interview from On Being.


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You’ve probably seen those psychedelic images from space; colorful clouds of swirling dust, galaxies colliding, and stars being born. But where do those images come from? How are they made? And does space seriously look like that?!

Look up into the night sky and you may be wowed by the sweeping arm of the milky way or a shooting star but in all that inky blackness, dappled by pinpoints of light, there are remarkably beautiful events unfolding beyond our sights! And we get to see them, all thanks to an amazing piece of human innovation.

By Liesl Ulrich-Verderber


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The traditional output of universities knowledge is not the missing piece to catalyzing social change. MIT Senior Lecturer Otto Scharmer offers a new university model that builds the capacity to lead transformative change through deeper inner work and outer knowledge, so we no longer collectively create environmental, social, and economic results that nobody wants.


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With spectacular visual images, this film reminds us of the necessity of connecting with the sacred in everyday life. It honors the sacred through sensory feelings of connection, with both the vast expanses such as mountain tops and waterfalls, and with the single dandelion sending its seeds into the future. This connection is further enhanced by the peaceful music that accompanies the images, providing a total experience of having touched the sacred.


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