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 ...

Of the dozens of artsy, hole-in-the-wall coffee shops tucked in twisting alleys of Seoul’s Itaewon and Haebongchong neighborhoods, Botton caught my eye because of the unusual brass plaque hanging on ...

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 ...

"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 ...

Work is activity that earns money. Lucky people enjoy their work, but even they might not do it without pay. To the extent that pay motivates, people work for the sake of something else — so they can ...

Online travel company Airbnb has collaborated with philosopher Alain de Botton to relaunch his book The Art of Travel-- now titled The New Art of Travel. The book features a new chapter by de Botton ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...