On a recent Friday afternoon, Alain de Botton, the forty-three-year-old author of “How Proust Can Change Your Life,” “The Architecture of Happiness,” “Religion for Atheists,” and other books, stood in ...

"Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind." , it's also a four-wheeled middle finger to ...

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or ...

On a recent weekday evening in London’s literary Bloomsbury quarter, a group of mostly white thirtysomethings gathered for a seminar called “How to Be Creative” at the School of Life, a London-based ...

Philosophy has earned a reputation as a complicated, inaccessible, and irrelevant pursuit, consigned mostly to old white men in wood-paneled offices. It’s vaguely associated with asking the kinds of ...

Why celebrity role models are OK, smartphones are not, and we should aspire to be more biased than the BBC. An hour of philosophical crowd-pleasing distilled into key quotes How to Think about Sex, ...

Harry Styles is a man smitten with fashion. He appreciates the architecture of a Saturday Night Fever–flare and is well-versed in the loveliness of a pearl necklace. So when Styles turned up to meet ...

One of the best books I have ever read, fiction or non-fiction, is Alain de Botton’s The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (Penguin, 2009). Brilliantly insightful, gorgeously written, and laugh-out-loud ...

There is scope to re-think the porn industry. By Nichi Hodgson Not content with ruminating on work, happiness, or airport queues, philosopher Alain de Botton has now turned his restless attentions to ...