“How Far Would you Travel for Happiness?”–A rich conversation with Marianna Pogosyan for her Psychology Today blog, posted November 8, 2023. “Our constant search for Paradise”—a long interview with the TED Radio Hour, broadcast on November 10, 2023 A long and rich e-mail conversation with Caryl Phillips, on migration and exile, in The Palgrave Handbook […]

If you’re interested in hearing Pico Iyer speak, here are a few dates and places to try: October 25 Conversation for UCSB’s Lifelong Learning InitiativeSanta Barbara, California October 26 Conversation with Walter Isaacson for UCSB A&L Santa Barbara, California October 30 Conversation with the Zen Luminaries series (online) Santa Rosa, California November 6 Keynote, International […]

“The Vedanta Temple: Our Second, Deeper Home”—a short essay for the Santa Barbara Independent, October 15, 2022 “A Man of Parts”–a review of A Private Spy: The Letters of John le Carre, for Air Mail, December 3, 2022 A discussion of le Carre, on “Monday Meeting,” the Air Mail podcast, December 5, 2022 My annual […]

Around Deer’s Slope”–an essay on walking for the book Where My Feet Fall, published by William Collins in Britain and excerpted in Orion, as “Never the Same River Twice,” March 16, 2022 “At a Loss”–an essay on Juzo Itami’s film The Funeral, for a new Criterion Collection DVD and Blu-Ray released on May 17, 2022, […]

(The following is an introduction to a new edition of Siddhartha, by Hermann Hesse, published to mark the 50th anniversary of the author’s death and the 90th anniversary of the book’s first appearance, by Peter Owen, in August 2012). “I can think, I can wait, I can fast.” As an innocent fifteen year-old, incarcerated in […]

“What am I afraid of ?” I asked myself not long ago. Not many things. A traveller can’t afford to carry fears with him, leaping into the unknown on every trip. The only things I could think of were snakes, which sometimes fill my dreams–and heights, which induce in me a mad impulse to take […]