Anna Amiradaki

Editor's Note | June 2026 When we first sat down with Julie Gerstenblatt for our Writers in Our Backyard series, her debut novel, Daughters of Nantucket, had received an enormous response from her readers. Our conversation ranged from childhood memories of stories and the discipline of a writing life to the responsibility writers carry in asking the enduring question: So what? Since then, Julie has continued to chart an ambitious literary course. Her second novel, The Stargazer of Nantucket,...

Dr. Achina Stein, owner of Functional Mind, Providence. A note from the editor There is a particular kind of exhaustion that has become almost universal: the exhaustion of a body that has been tested, medicated, referred, retested, and is still not well. It is the exhaustion not just of symptoms, but of not being believed or listened to. Of being handed a prescription for something that treats the surface while the deeper question goes unasked. Functional medicine begins with that question....

Time at work. Jasper Hill Farm's aging cellars, Greensboro, Vermont. Mateo Kehler and the Primordial Memory of Cheese The Meaning of Your Life by Arthur C. Brooks has been embraced as a much needed remedy to America's biggest ailment: loss of community, meaning, and a devastatingly alarming rise of anxiety and depression amongst our youth — in numbers never seen before. This book, along with Plays Well with Others by Eric Barker, is only a fraction of a plethora of dialogue happening across...