I received an email from a reader recently:

Dear Monica,

I had to share the description of a sunset written by my Great Aunt Florence in 1954, setting on the Oregon coast. The sunset description begins at the end of the first page and continues to the second page. The first time I read this description, I stopped in awe.

Thank you for letting me share this with you,

Elaine H., founder of Global Belly Laugh Day, January 24

I was so taken by Great Aunt Florence’s letter and Elaine’s subsequent message, I wanted to share them with you. I love this for a few reasons.

The first is that Great Aunt Flo (I am taking liberties, but I feel she would’ve been Ok with me calling her Flo) has presumably seen this sunset off the grey sand beaches of Twin Rocks, Oregon a multitude of times, and yet, on this day — Christmas Eve 1953 — she was deeply observant enough of this daily banal terrestrial ritual to really see it for all its splendour.

The second thing I love about this is that she was so awed by this sunset, ‘the magnificence of which [she] had not seen before,’ that she felt compelled to write about it to Ruth and Jeb. And that this simple shared observation of an event that occurs every single night (26,122 of them since Flo’s ‘chromo’ beauty) has managed to spread and multiply her wonder across seven decades.

And lastly, I love that this small missive was first handwritten. (Oh, how I do miss handwritten letters. I had two friends in particular who would send me the most gorgeous letters. My friend Kerry had beautiful handwriting and would adorn the outside of the envelope with all manner of small flowers and other doilies, the edges of which would strain from the reams of flowing script and stories it contained within. The other, Rachel, would take the cover of a magazine or perhaps a part of the comics pages from the newspaper, and fold it cleverly into an envelope, which I would open gingerly so as to preserve her humble work of art. I could tell from across the room if it was one of theirs. What joy.) And then it was saved, scanned and sent to me digitally. A gift made possible by the wonders of old and new technology combined.

So many reminders of wonder in such a simple missive. To be present. To slow down. To not only notice, but note the quotidian wonders in our life. And most poignantly, that wonder shared, even across oceans and aeons, is wonder multiplied.

On this first week of July 2025, why don’t you send a handwritten letter to someone sharing a small wonder from your day? Maybe your great-grand niece will come upon it in 2097 and be filled with the same wonder you were today.

Some wonderbringers for me this week:

• Why handwritten letters mean so much: A student’s lifelong appreciation for writing and receiving letters exemplifies research on the emotional action of self-disclosure.

• How to write letters: A 19th-Century guide to the lost art of epistolary etiquette.

• WATCH: And if you aren’t familiar with Letters of Note and their Letters Live events, you will thank me for this reading of a letter by Olivia Coleman (that I was lucky enough to see live).

With wonder,

Hello Wonderseekers!

Some great news in Alzheimer’s research came out this week!

One of the challenges with Alzheimer’s is that it often isn’t diagnosed until quite late. This can be due to a number of factors, but mostly it is human nature. Many of the early warning signs, like misplacing things or forgetting details, can also be the result of lack of sleep or (peri)menopause. Many older people live alone, so those signs may not be noticed by the individual themselves, and even if they are observed by a partner, often the changes are a slow creep, until suddenly the deficits are glaring.

There is a great line in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises where one character asks, “How did you go bankrupt?” and the other responds, “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” It’s apt description of what dementia is like for most people, and that means folks are being diagnosed up to 20 years after the disease has begun.

There are a few different tests currently for Alzheimer’s or other forms of dementia, but none are great. The first line approach tends to be cognitive and memory tests— lengthy tests that require trained staff to deliver them, and the results are iffy, as they can be confounded by test anxiety or language issues. And when not done properly, their accuracy can drop to below 60%. There are blood tests that look for evidence of amyloid plaques, but these have to be done in a doctor’s office and plaque levels that can vary greatly in the early stages of the disease. The other options are for much later stage decline, like brain scans and spinal taps, and these are very involved, expensive, and invasive.

That’s why it’s incredibly exciting that researchers have shown that a simple EEG tool can identify Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI, a precursor to Alzheimer’s) very early. This tool, known as the Fastball EEG, can be self-administered in the home and takes only three minutes.

Participants place a small EEG reader about the size of a sports headband on their head. Then, rather than being asked to solve problems or recall information, they are simply asked to look at and name a group of eight images. After, they are shown a series of hundreds of flashing images, but embedded within the random images are those of the eight previously seen. The EEG measures the recognition response to those original images, which is weaker in people with MCI. This test can be used longitudinally to track cognitive decline over time, and by identifying MCI early, the exciting new drug therapies for Alzheimer’s can be prescribed decades earlier.

This research was funded by the UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR). Just a little reminder of the power of government funding for life-changing and life-saving research.

Some wonderbringers for me this week:

• A pill to heal the brain: Neurologists are exploring medications that would help the brain recover after a stroke or traumatic injury.

• ‘I was floored by the data’: Psilocybin shows anti-aging properties in early study.

• New bionic knee is a game-changer for lower leg amputees: Scientists have developed an improved prosthesis that is integrated with muscle and bone.

Looking for a little mood boost? Check out this awesome flash mob singing Bohemian Rhapsody in the streets of Paris!

With wonder,

Some wonderbringers for me this week:

• How to live a miraculous life: Not long before his untimely death by an aggressive brain tumor, author Brian Doyle — who described himself as “a muddle and a conundrum shuffling slowly along the road, gaping in wonder, trying to just see and say what is” — took up the question of how to live a miraculous life. His answer became the posthumous essay collection One Long River of Song: Notes on Wonder. Maria Popova examines his advice which includes:

  “You do your absolute best to find and hone and wield your divine gifts against the dark. You do your best to reach out tenderly to touch and elevate as many people as you can reach. You bring your naked love and defiant courage and salty grace to bear as much as you can, with all the attentiveness and humor you can muster. This life is after all a miracle and we ought to pay fierce attention every moment, as much as possible.” - Brian Doyle

• An ancient astronomer who signed his work: Inside a hidden room at the ancient Maya ruins of Xultun in Guatemala, archaeologists have decoded the celestial equations of an astronomer-mathematician dating back to AD 781. Painted on and etched into the wall are more than 50 faint mathematical “microtexts” detailing the the cycles of Venus and Mars. Amongst them are 11 glyphs that turn out to be the signature of Sak Tahn Waax, or “White-chested Fox”. One archaeologist described it as “looking at an old ‘whiteboard’ in someone’s abandoned office.” As the first and only Maya astronomer to be credited for their work, Sak Tahn Waax now sits alongside other influential astronomers and mathematicians like Pythagoras, Galileo, and Newton.

• Don’t play with your food (unless you’re an Orca): These orcas ram a sunfish so hard it explodes. But why? Off Cabo San Lucas, biologists watched one orca hold a sunfish steady while another lined up and rammed it at speed, scattering the remains like confetti. The reason behind this newly described “stabilize-and-ram” behaviour is still being debated. “We think this may help younger orcas feed more easily — or it could also just be for fun,” scientist Kathryn Ayres says. “Orcas are known for playing with their food.”

• Wondermaker of the week, Thomas Dambo, the garbage artist hiding giants in forests: Danish artist Dambo has built more than 150 giant trolls from scrap wood and pallets across 17 countries, hidden in forests and parks with a public treasure map so people can hunt them. He rejects “environmentalist” for his own title, preferring “garbage artist”. His goal is to have a giant in every US state. “There is endless, endless trash,” Dambo explains, “So that basically means that we’re throwing out unlimited wealth, and that wealth can be translated into great artistic experiences.”

As usual, I will be taking a little break in August, and use it as a chance to share some of your favourite previously published Wonderbringers from the last year. I will also be using that time to switch newsletter platforms, so be on the lookout in September for a new look and a new platform!

I hope you have a wonderful end of summer!

With Wonder,

                                                                                                           Photo by Benjamin Voros

Some wonderbringers for me this week:

• Coffee's real benefit may have been discovered: A mountain of population studies link coffee to longer, healthier lives, and researchers at Texas A&M have discovered a possible source (and it isn’t caffeine).  It turns out that the polyphenols in regular brewed coffee interact with a receptor called NR4A1, a protein that protects normal cells under stress but gets hijacked to fuel growth in some cancer cells. These same compounds appear to support NR4A1's protective role in healthy cells while blocking its cancer-promoting role in tumour cells. So have that second (or third) cup!

• The mystery hum, half-solved: For decades, 2-4% of people worldwide have been tormented by a low droning sound with no visible source. “The Hum”, that is audible to those afflicted but silent to everyone else, was initially thought to be sound waves from sources like traffic, wind turbines, or ocean waves picked up by hyper-sensitive ears. New research suggests the explanation isn't out there at all, but inside the ear itself. It appears to be a rare, low-frequency form of tinnitus.

• A rare double bill in the sky: The annual Perseids meteor shower began July 14th and will peak on the nights of August 11-13th. But this year the peak occurs under a brand new moon, meaning close to zero moonlight and some of the darkest skies going, with rates approaching 100 meteors an hour. Parts of the Arctic, Iceland and Spain get an added treat of a total solar eclipse earlier that same day. Follow the link to learn everything you need to know about the Perseid meteor shower and how to see it.

• Wondermaker of the week, Meg Saligman, the artist who turned a derelict bank into six floors of wonder: A well-known Philadelphia public artist bought a vacant 19th-century bank building and transformed it into the "Ministry of Awe". Working with more than 100 local artists across disciplines, the 8,500 square-foot immersive experience blends sculpture, murals, robotics, AI, embroidery, mosaics, and performance art, with visitors themselves often becoming part of the artwork. It’s described as “a bank with no money, where the only currency is the human spirit.” As Saligman explains, “At this bank, we trade in curiosity, imagination, and awe.”

With wonder,

Copyright ©2026  Monica C. Parker. All rights reserved.

Some wonderbringers for me this week:

• Why we care so much about the World Cup: UBC psychologists on why fandom sticks. Once a team becomes part of your identity, it stays there even when the sport doesn’t — which is why a tournament landing in your own city can pull a former version of yourself back to the surface.

• Why midlife might actually be awesome: The “downhill from here” story about your 40s and 50s turns out to be mostly wrong. New research on generativity, crystallised intelligence and deepening relationships suggests midlife is often when people feel most capable, not least.

• Five psychology tricks players use at the World Cup: Messi’s eyes are often off the ball, not on it. A sport psychologist explains how elite strikers deliberately let their attention drift, so they can snap into total focus the instant it counts.

• Wondermaker of the Week: Brad Parks, inventor of wheelchair tennis. In 1976, an 18 year old skier named Brad Parks broke his spine in a freestyle accident. From his hospital bed he began wondering what tennis might look like played in a wheelchair. Fifty years on, that imagined sport has reached Grand Slam status, filling Wimbledon’s 12,345 seat Court One.  

Hope everyone is enjoying this summer of great sport!

With wonder,

Copyright ©2026  Monica C. Parker. All rights reserved.

I watched a man’s home vanish in less than six minutes. That’s all it took from when someone raised the alarm that my neighbour Chris’s barge, Mariposa, was sinking to when it was fully submerged.

As a small handful of us stood on the pontoon in helpless disbelief, we heard the dogs barking. Oh god. Chris has two dogs, Marley, an elderly lab, and DJ, a sprightly Pomeranian.

Before I could even process what was happening, another neighbour, Dan, had flung himself into the listing barge — the water waist deep at this point — and headed into the flooded inner cabin. “The water is coming in too fast with the door open,” he yelled back at us on the mooring. “Close the door behind me so I can grab them.”

In that moment it didn’t occur to us — the insanity of sealing a man inside a sinking ship. You don’t really think about these things as they are happening. So we pushed the door closed against the weight of the water, and Dan disappeared into the darkening space, leaving only the sounds of the frightened dogs and his voice coaxing them out.

“I’ve got the big one!” Dan finally cried, after what felt like an eternity.

By this time another neighbour, Robyn, had hopped into the stern, and the two of us began prising the door open against the rushing water. First a yellow snout emerged, then a head, as Dan began heaving very cross, very confused, very wet hounds into the waiting arms of Robyn, now crouched in the flooded wheelhouse, and then to myself on the pontoon. In a soggy flurry, all living creatures exited the barge.

Within moments, the 53ft barge began to take the entire pontoon under. Wood and rope groaned under the strain, water lapping over the floating structure. Then a sound like a gunshot — the snapping of Mariposa’s mooring line, thick as my thumb. Without that to hold the thirty-ton vessel, all there was left to do was watch.

Three minutes later, the boat was gone. All that made Chris’s house a home lay at the bottom of a marina that has welcomed barges since 1770. All in less time than it takes to boil a kettle.

I have never felt so incapable. So helpless. So sick.

Then it fell to me to call him and share the news. I didn’t know any way to soften the blow, so I just told him outright. The dogs are saved, but your home is gone.

Since moving onto a barge last year, we’ve had our own moments of forgetting and then remembering that we live on the water. The feel of the house shifting in heavy wind. The haunted creaking of the boat at night. A lost grip while doing DIY ending with a tool in the drink instead of on the ground.

But this was a different recognition — of the vulnerability of our chosen life on the water. And there was another realisation, too: that this precarity creates a camaraderie and solidarity unique to those who share it.

Wonder can come from seeing people do selfless things. It can also come when confronted with the fragility of life.

The dark side of wonder

Wonder may seem like a universally positive emotion, but history tells a different story. Look far enough back into the word itself and fear was always part of the equation. Depending on which dictionary you read, wonder has as many as eleven definitions as both noun and verb. Its roots run through the Greek teras and the Latin miraculum, both meaning miracle, and the Germanic wundran, likely taken from the Old Norse undr, “to surprise”.

The University of California’s Lisa Sideris calls wonder an “umbrella term”, and points to a darker root. “Some accounts suggest the German, wunder, that traces it to wound — that element of awe that can open you up in a kind of terrifying way and expose you, or make you vulnerable, but then many good things can come from that kind of vulnerability.”

Like the twins of Gemini, wonder has always had two faces — the majestic sigh of a perfect sunset paired with the horror of an impassive hurricane.

Even darker awe, I’ve come to appreciate, does something extraordinary to us. Across a series of studies, researchers have found that awe reliably shrinks our sense of self. People who feel awe, sometimes from nothing more elaborate than standing in a grove of tall trees, feel smaller and less self-important, and then, in turn, behave more generously, more honestly, more willing to put themselves out for a stranger. Researchers call this phenomenon the “small self”.

I felt it. In the face of something so much bigger than me, the usual anxious chatter of my own concerns simply went quiet, and the only thought that remained was that my community needed help.

Silver linings

The reality is that most wonder is nothing like a sinking barge. Researchers estimate that only 20-30% of awe experiences involve any sort of threat. But of those who have experienced threat-based awe, 69% described what researchers called “silver linings” — glimmers of humanity amidst the tragedy. Threat-based awe makes us feel helpless and strips away our sense of personal control, but silver linings hand a little of it back, and with it, a measure of resilience.

We watched this play out on a global scale during the pandemic. COVID-19 was a textbook case of threat-based awe. Vast, overwhelming, impossible to grasp, yet threaded with silver linings in the collective response of health care workers and whole communities. Its sheer scale provoked the “small self” and nudged people towards problem-focused coping: washing hands, wearing masks, checking on neighbours. Wonder may feel like a solitary emotion, but it is socially bonding by nature, and those small acts of altruism and self-sacrifice, born of something frightening, still carried the seed of resilience and hope.

I think that is what I witnessed unfolding on my pontoon. Threat-based awe with its silver lining arriving almost in the same breath. There was no plan. Dan simply went into the cabin, Robyn into the stern. The dogs came up wet and cross and alive. For a few minutes, a handful of very independent-minded people became a single, purposeful thing — and the smallness I felt in the face of that sinking barge was the very thing that turned me outward. Towards Chris, towards his dogs, towards the people beside me on the mooring, towards the community we share.

The particular grace of a life on the water

There is a prevailing narrative about how humans behave in a catastrophe. That we are inherently selfish creatures, that the veneer of civilisation is thin, that panic and looting are only ever a few minutes away. But research shows quite the opposite. In an emergency, people overwhelmingly turn towards one another, and the bonds forged in the worst hours persist, making communities stronger. Precarity, rather than breaking us apart, often binds us more closely together.

I have come to realise that life on the water makes this precarity especially visible. Of the roughly thirty-five thousand licensed boats on Britain’s network, around one in five is somebody’s home, and your home, when afloat, is not an inert thing you inhabit but a creature you must continually tend, exposed to weather and water and your own small lapses of attention.

Precarity, it turns out, is exactly the soil in which these kinds of bonds grow. The people with the least buffer against disaster are consistently the ones who give the most freely — not despite their exposure but because of it. When your way of life reminds you every day that you are not in full control, the neighbour who will leap into a sinking ship to save your most cherished possessions or take a wet dog into her arms without being asked, stops being a nicety and becomes the rigging your life depends on.

When I think about those six minutes now, the word I keep returning to is wonder. Not because it was beautiful. It wasn’t. It was one of the worst afternoons I can remember. But wonder, properly understood, isn’t only about beauty. It is what happens when the world becomes suddenly, undeniably larger than the account we were keeping of it. Sometimes that largeness arrives as a temple roof or a pond full of water lilies. Sometimes it arrives as a man’s home going under in six minutes, and neighbours who do not hesitate.

Both leave you smaller. Both leave you a little more inclined, afterwards, to turn towards the people around you. The dogs are safe. The home is gone. Chris will rebuild his life. And the community that reached into the water for those two frightened animals is, I understand now, the most durable thing any of us out here on the water can actually possess.

With wonder,

Copyright ©2026  Monica C. Parker. All rights reserved.

Some wonderbringers for me this week:

• Forgiveness rewrites how the brain stores a hurtful memory: We've always been told to "forgive and forget," but it’s actually more like “forgive and heal.” A new study finds that forgiving someone who hurt you can change how your brain stores the memory,  making it feel less upsetting without erasing what actually happened. People still recalled being wronged but they no longer felt wounded by it. Forgiveness is a form of emotional wound care.

• They knew the pill was fake but their memory still improved: In a fascinating new trial, healthy older adults saw measurable improvements in memory, physical performance and stress after taking placebo pills for just three weeks.. But the surprising part was that the placebo worked even when participants knew the pills were placebos. This makes “open-label placebos” a promising and ethically acceptable strategy for supporting healthy aging.

• There’s more than cuteness behind the tilt: When Fido gives you that endearing head-cock, he may be more than the cutest boi. He could be deep in thought. By studying rare dogs who can learn the names of dozens of toys, researchers found these "gifted word learners" tilted their heads in 43% of trials when asked to fetch a toy by name, against just 2% for ordinary dogs. Each dog favoured the same side to tilt, wherever its owner stood, not listening harder, but thinking harder.

• Wondermaker of the week: Professor Claire Spottiswoode: For over a decade, the zoologist could be found in the wooded savannas of northern Mozambique, studying the Yao honey-hunters of the Niassa reserve and the wild birds who work alongside them. Together they've shown that people and a free-living wild bird, the greater honeyguide, actually talk to each other. A hunter calls out with a trill and the bird answers, leading him, tree by tree, to a hidden bees' nest. Spottiswoode uncovered this centuries-old conversation handed down from father to son and from bird to bird, documenting one of the last true partnerships left between humans and a wild animal.

With wonder,

Some wonderbringers for me this week:

• Can apes play pretend? What scientists learned from having imaginary ‘tea parties’ with Kanzi the bonobo: Kanzi could tell a researcher which cup still held the pretend juice and which had been "poured" back into the pitcher. It's the first time imagination has been demonstrated in a nonhuman animal under controlled conditions, hinting that the machinery of make-believe may reach back six to nine million years to the ancestor we share with the great apes.

• Did humans observe the solstice at this site centuries before Stonehenge?:

  Days before this year's solstice, archaeologists announced what may be the earliest known solar alignment on the Stonehenge landscape: two long-rotted wooden posts on a hillside near Bulford, a few miles east of the stones, set out around 2950 B.C.E. — roughly 500 years before the standing stones were raised around 2500 B.C.E.

• How becoming a dad changes men’s brains; Scanning first-time fathers before and after their child's birth, researchers see a change in grey matter in the circuitry we use to think about what another person is feeling, wanting, and intending. Neuroscientists believe it is the brain refining itself for the close attention a new, wordless person demands.

• Wondermaker of the Week — Justin and Ruby Reynolds, the father and daughter who found a sea monster skeleton: On a fossil hunt along the English coast of Somerset, Justin Reynolds and his eleven-year-old daughter Ruby picked up a strange chunk of bone. They recognised it as possibly belonging to an Ichthyotitan severnensis,  aka “the giant fish lizard of the Severn", a Late Triassic sea reptile. Ruby became a published scientist before she'd left school, and her dad got to be the one to share in the 202 million-year-old discovery.

And a lovely message from Wonderbringers reader Dennis: “The summer solstice is one of the few days that comes with a built-in permission structure. More light means more biological signal, more natural energy and a stronger case than usual for doing things differently. It doesn’t ask you to overhaul your life. It allows you to show up for one day with a little more intention.”

With wonder,

Some wonderbringers for me this week:

• The visions the Andes kept secret: Two thousand years before the Inca, the elite leadership of Chavín de Huántar in the Peruvian highlands carved tubes from hollow bone to inhale DMT (aka ‘The Spirit Molecule’) but only in tiny private stone chambers, a handful of people at a time. Archaeologists now believe that Chavín’s rulers deliberately controlled access to these altered states to convince people that their leadership was mystically bestowed.

• A mind-bending view: Astronauts who see the Earth from orbit often come home changed. The effect of seeing our small, fragile marble suspended in inky dark. Borders erased, nations and nationalities almost nonsensical constructs, everything achingly connected. Psychedelics offer the same sense of expansive connectedness, just like astronauts have felt looking back to Earth from space without leaving the ground.

• Science gets closer to understanding how a psychedelic trip changes the brain: A new study found that a single dose of psilocybin left first-time volunteers with measurable changes in brain "entropy" — the diversity and richness of neural activity — that lingered for up to a month and tracked with lasting feelings of insight and wellbeing. The trip itself, it seems, may be the point rather than a side effect.

• Podcast: Wondermaker of the week: When Marcus Capone, a Navy SEAL of thirteen years, came home from war racked with depression and on the edge of suicide, his wife Amber refused to give up. Their story of finding healing through psychedelics and helping more than 1,300 other Vets in the process, is told in the Netflix documentary In Waves and War.

I hope you enjoy some psychedelic wonderbringers inspired by the Interdisciplinary Conference on Psychedelic Research!

With wonder,

The Muscle Remembers

On the people and places that live in our bodies

There is a particular kind of memory that doesn’t live in the brain at all.

When you train a muscle hard enough to make it grow, the fibres respond. They recruit new nuclei — the tiny command centres that run the cell — and fuse them in. But the astonishing part is what happens when you stop training. The muscle shrinks back to its ordinary size, and for a long while it looks as if you had never worked out in the first place. That all your gains were lost. But in truth, those extra nuclei stick around and stay stable for at least fifteen years. Some say even for life. So the next time you ask that muscle to grow, it grows far faster than a muscle being called into action for the first time. The body keeps a record of how strong it once was, even when we forget it ourselves.

We call this muscle memory, and we usually mean something inconsequential by it: the way your hands still find the chords on the fret or how you never quite forget how to ride a bike. But as I have spent the last few weeks moving between remembrances, I have come to think the phrase is far more literal, and far more tender, than we might imagine. The people we love and the places that hold us are not filed away somewhere in our memory banks as mere data points. They are fused into us — an interwoven part of our psychic fascia — long after we have physically left those people and places, waiting to be called back into use and remind us of our forgotten strength.

The Half That Stays

A few weeks ago, I sat at my father-in-law’s funeral and watched his wife of sixty-five years come to terms with the loss of, quite literally, half of herself.

Sixty-five years. Think about what that does to two nervous systems. Researchers who study long-married couples have found that their bodies slowly fall into step with one another — heart rates, breathing, sleep cycles, even the stress hormones that rise and fall across a day. After enough decades, two people are no longer fully running their own physiology. They are co-regulating, each one a pacemaker for the other. Her body had spent two-thirds of a century learning the precise weight and warmth and rhythm of him. He was not only a person she remembered. He was a function of her own anatomy.

Which is why bereavement is never only an emotional event. It is a physical one. Scientists call it the widowhood effect — the well-documented rise in a surviving spouse’s own risk of dying in the period after losing their partner. The heart, asked to regulate alone for the first time in decades, sometimes simply cannot find the rhythm on its own.

And yet, watching her, I kept returning to those retained nuclei. Sixty-five years of him are not gone from her. They are fused in. Load-bearing. A permanent scaffolding built from love. The grief is so vast precisely because the love was so painstakingly constructed over time — and that structure does not vanish the moment the load is removed. It persists — the very thing that will save her, or crush her. It is the truest and most heartrending kind of muscle memory there is.

Designed to Hold a Person

From the funeral I travelled to Amsterdam for a conference, the concept of muscle memory flitting through my brain as I landed into at the all-too-familiar Schiphol.

I once came within a signature of renting a flat at 77 Vondelstraat — Oud Leyerhoven, the redbrick villa Pierre Cuypers built for himself and lived in, on the street he master-planned and named. Cuypers, the Dutch architect whose works, such as the Rijksmuseum and Centraal Station, defined the city’s aesthetic heart, had given the house its best rooms at the back, overlooking the Vondelpark. It had been the architect’s home, then a music school, then flats — a whole succession of lives held in the same rooms before it nearly held mine.

Cuypers pursued what the Germans called the Gesamtkunstwerk, or ‘the total work of art’ — the philosophy that a building’s outside and inside should be one continuous, deliberate, embodied feeling, and that the architect was responsible not merely for the walls but for the experience of being held inside them. I never did move into that house — I moved to London instead — but I return to that idea constantly: that a place can be designed to hold a person. And in a way, a person can be designed to hold a place too.

Despite not moving there, it is a place that still holds me, is still part of my scaffolding. Amsterdam gave me my husband. We both lived in London but worked for Dutch firms, and it was those firms that introduced us to one another. Environmental psychologists call this place attachment — the way certain locations stop being mere coordinates and instead become part of our sense of self.

The body learns a city the way it learns a dance. I fall into a familiar jig as I absorb the pewter-green shimmer of the canals, the urgent dinging of bicycle bells, the cobbled geometry of a street walked a hundred times. I can land in Amsterdam after years away, and my feet know where to go for my bitterballen and Vlaamse frites before my mind has even caught up. Like muscle memory, the city is fused into me, and when I return, I grow back into the person I was there — hungry for new experiences, seeing everything through fresh eyes.

The Place That Took Me In

After Amsterdam, I travelled to an idyllic little island called Lusty Beg, in County Fermanagh, reachable only by chain ferry. I was there for another conference, this one put on by a group of women who I’ve grown very close to over more than ten years working together.

I first moved to Belfast seventeen years ago to do my master’s degree, having just left an abusive marriage. I arrived, if I am honest, atrophied. Shrunk down to almost nothing, unsure how much of me was even left, and questioning if it would be enough to succeed. It was as though my psyche was an Olympic-sized pool that had been emptied one teaspoon at a time. So many small removals that went unnoticed until I suddenly discovered I was empty.

Northern Ireland is where I came to escape. To refill. It is the place that took me in when I had the least to offer and asked for nothing in return except that I stay long enough to become myself again. I rediscovered my joy of learning, graduating first in my class. I dated a much younger man who reminded me of the forgotten frisson of infatuation. I made lifelong friends who have grown from fresh-faced grads into people with families of their own.

And Ireland granted me a network that changed the trajectory of my life. I met authors who strengthened my belief in myself. I saw speakers who bettered my skills. I built a circle of women who act as my personal board of directors, guiding, supporting and commiserating. Now I am returning to do my PhD, and despite some nervousness, I feel the muscles of my past Belfast days firing again. I left it strong and used that growth to create a life I still pinch myself about. I am not starting from nothing now; I am just retraining a muscle that already knows what I am capable of becoming.

Nothing Is Ever Lost

Lately, with deaths and changes and liminal spaces, I have felt myself shrinking again, but here is the stubborn hope I have been carrying over these last few weeks.

The feelings these places and people triggered — belonging, nostalgia, growth, gezellig — are as alive as they ever were. They remind me that a muscle built long ago and then lost over time does not begin from zero when you ask it to grow again. It comes back faster, because the infrastructure was never dismantled. The nuclei lie dormant, not destroyed. I may only see these friends once a year, but the muscle memory of our friendship responds when we are back together. We leave a few hours or a few days later with stronger sinews between us all, ready for the fused nuclei of our companionship to respond when activated in another year or so.

We tend to grieve change as deletion. We leave a city, a marriage, a self, a person — and we mourn it as though it has been erased. We are saddened to leave a friend when we don’t know the next time we’ll see them. Even more so as we come to realise that no day is guaranteed. But the body keeps better records than that. The people who shaped us, the places that held us, the strength we built and were certain we had lost — none of it is gone. It is fused in. Retained. Load-bearing. A widow carries sixty-five years inside her chest. A city dances back into your feet the moment you return to it. A place that once received you at your lowest still holds the shape of the healed you, waiting for you to return and grow again.

As Maya Angelou wrote, “The ache for home lives in all of us. The safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.” I have come to believe that safe place is not so much out there in the world, waiting to be found, but rather something we build inside ourselves. Nucleus by nucleus, built from every person and every place we were ever strong enough to love.

So if you are between places or people this week — leaving one, returning to another, quietly mourning a third — let me give you this: nothing that ever made you strong is truly lost. It’s still there inside you. And the next time you are faced with the need to call it back into duty, you will be greeted with the familiar strength you had long forgotten.

The muscle remembers. So do we.

Apologies for any confusion, as it appears not everyone received the newsletter yesterday. Not sure what happened, but if this is a duplicate for you, consider it a bonus!

With wonder

,

Some wonderbringers for me this week:

• The science of human connection: New social-science research on how much we quietly rely on one another turns up some lovely surprises. We ask the people around us for small favours every couple of minutes — and they say yes far more often than no. Stranger still, English speakers use "please" in fewer than 10% of requests to family or friends, saving the magic word mostly for moments of friction. And the lab of Naomi Eisenberger has found that acts of kindness do more to ease depression, anxiety and loneliness than acts of self-care — proof that being good to others may be one of the kindest things you can do for yourself too.

• A tiny reef fish that may experiment with its own reflection: Give a cleaner wrasse a mirror and a fake parasite, and it won't just scrape the spot off — some drop a bit of shrimp in front of the glass and watch how the reflection moves, the same "test how this works" curiosity we've only ever credited to dolphins and manta rays. It's reopening one of biology's biggest questions: who, exactly, gets to count as self-aware?

• Why almost all of us are right-handed: A new study traces our overwhelming right-handedness back to two turning points in human history — standing up on two legs, which freed the hands for fine work, and then the growth of a bigger brain that hardwired the preference in. The thing your hand does without a thought, written into us millions of years ago.

• Wondermaker of the week: In May 2021, a Home Office immigration van arrived at dawn on a Glasgow street on the morning of Eid — and within minutes, neighbours poured out and surrounded it, a handful swelling to hundreds, until after an eight-hour standoff their two detained neighbours walked free. Felipe Bustos Sierra's joyful documentary, Everybody to Kenmure Street, built from the crowd's own phone footage and executive produced by Emma Thompson, just won Sundance's Special Jury Award for Civil Resistance. Proof of what ordinary people can do when they simply turn up.

I’m on the road the next few weeks. First, I’ll be in Haarlem, Netherlands at the Interdisciplinary Conference on Psychedelic Research. Then I’ll be heading up to Lusty Beg, Northern Ireland to kick-off the SheVentures Summit with the opening keynote. (Most ticket packages are sold out for SheVentures, but I have a cheeky discount code if you were shut out and want to join us!)

If you’ll be attending either of these conferences, please find me and say hi!

With wonder,

A Nepali tastes mad honey harvested from the country’s highland cliffs. (Image: Medicinal Mad Honey)        

Some wonderbringers for me this week:

• Secrets of the bees: Revealing the sneaky genius of nature's brightest thinkers. New science is showing that nature’s vital pollinators are smarter than we ever imagined. Here’s why that discovery should change what we think about one of the world’s most important animals.

• Mad honey: “‘Don’t eat two big spoons of mad honey a day,’ read the awkward warning on the side of the jar. But by the time I read it, I had already gulped down three.” Nepal’s Apis dorsata laboriosa is the largest honeybee in the world and its nectar boasts hallucinogenic properties. (Effects documented from 401 BC, when Greek soldiers indulged in a similar honey and were debilitated with intoxication.)

• Listen: A linguistic mystery: Bees have coexisted with us for over a millennium, and yet the exact origin of "bee" itself remains a linguistic mystery largely because of the insect's long history on the planet. Because bees and beekeeping have existed for millions of years, it’s difficult to trace the etymology.  

• Wondermaker of the week: Bees are critical to the world's ecosystems, and this past week was World Bee Day. Watch this incredible film celebrating the story of a group of women in Makongeni, Kenya, whose work looking after bees has protected a whole ecosystem.

With wonder,

Follow Me

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Copyright ©*|CURRENT_YEAR|*  Monica C. Parker. All rights reserved.

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London, UK NW1 4EB

Wonderbringers brings weekly nuggets of wonder to your mailbox every Wednesday,

with a deeper dive essay on the first Wednesday of every month.

Lake Uru Uru flamingos by Reuters          

Some wonderbringers for me this week:

• The lasting power of good memories: A positive spin on our past can help protect us against pain. And we don’t have to only have happy memories. Even just finding a silver lining to tough times makes us more resilient.

• How Mass Culture Events Are Uniting Us In 2026: Lately, a series of mass culture events has been pulling us back together. A small surprise in an age when the monoculture has dissolved into a million algorithmic niches. "Culture is meant to be communal. Without communality, it loses some of its essential impact."

• The 1918 Flu faded in our collective memory: We might ‘forget’ the coronavirus, too.

  The legacy of the 20th century’s deadliest pandemic shows how large groups remember — and forget — their shared past.

• Wondermaker of the week: Dayana Blanco, a twenty-seven-year-old Aymara woman who has done what most people said was impossible: she mobilised her community to restore Lake Uru Uru, once one of Bolivia's most polluted lakes. She won the 2026

  Future For Nature Award but the biggest reward is that the flamingos have returned! You can also hear from her here.

Sorry I missed last week everyone! I was making memories with family and quite honestly forgot what day of the week it was!

With wonder,

Follow Me

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Copyright ©*|CURRENT_YEAR|*  Monica C. Parker. All rights reserved.

Want to unsubscribe? That’s ok! We’re sad to see you go, but you’ll still be a part of our Wonderbringer community in spirit.

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Wonderbringers brings weekly nuggets of wonder to your mailbox every Wednesday,

with a deeper dive essay on the first Wednesday of every month.

Photo by Unsplash

The Curiosity Tax: How Wonder Became the Next Luxury Good

Jaak Panksepp, in his book The Archaeology of the Mind, described seven primary emotional systems: play, care, lust, fear, rage, anxiety and seeking. Long before language, writing or agriculture, our brains were seeking — wondering and curious. Other animals make an exploration–exploitation trade‑off with their curiosity, spending roughly 20% of their time exploring and 80% exploiting what they’ve learned.

Human curiosity doesn’t work that way. We explore for knowledge and for play and for creativity and for pleasure. Cicero defined curiosity as an “innate love of learning and of knowledge… without the lure of any profit.” What happens when profit becomes the precondition for what we study, feel, and do — and curiosity is quietly taxed out of existence for most people?

The Degree You Can't Justify

For most of history, the examined life — reading widely, experimenting, asking big questions, studying things of beauty rather than things of profit — belonged to people who didn’t need to worry about money. The GI Bill briefly democratised that, granting working‑class Americans access to a liberal arts education that had once signalled privilege. But as lower‑income students entered higher education, universities built higher walls, raising fees to heights unreachable without taking on the heavy debt of student loans.

Now even accessing those loans is at risk. In the US, “value for money” reforms are tying student loan access to graduate earnings, turning a liberal arts degree into a financial gamble that only the wealthy can safely make. As one Oberlin student put it, those with financial stability “have the privilege to make mistakes and take chances. To us, college itself is a privilege.” And this is happening just as experts argue we need more humanities, not less, if we want an economy left when AI is done with us.

The Busyness Epidemic

We have never had so many time‑saving devices, and yet so little time. The productivity–leisure paradox means that as labour‑saving technology multiplies, our experience of time scarcity doesn’t improve, it actually deteriorates. We have dishwashers, washing machines, GPS, instant communication and Amazon and Uber Eats, and still feel more rushed than any generation on record. It’s another paradox. Efficiency creates capacity, but that capacity is instantly populated by more tasks.

Oxford economist Olivier Sterck offers a new lens on this. Instead of asking how many dollars a country produces, he asks how long it takes the average person to earn enough for a basic basket of goods. By this “average poverty” measure, the US is among the poorest developed nations. It takes an American about 63 minutes to earn what it takes a German only 26. Average poverty in the US is roughly double that of France, Germany and the UK, and has worsened sharply over the last 35 years. It is no surprise then that countries with more time, like France, the Netherlands, and the Nordics, also have higher arts participation and reported wellbeing. Curiosity needs cognitive slack, and cognitive slack is distributed about as unevenly as everything else in the American economy.

The Vanishing Patron and the Narrowing Imagination

For the small minority who ignore all of this long enough to become artists, writers, thinkers and explorers, the ground is shifting too. From the Medicis onward, wealthy patrons bankrolled art because they believed in its civilising power and wanted proximity to brilliance. Industrial‑era benefactors funded wonder-incubators like libraries and museums and made them free. They paid for scholarships, residencies, time and tools so a coal miner’s daughter or a secretary’s son had a real chance to turn talent into a body of work.

Today’s billionaires mostly want the aura, not the obligation. They’ll pay to have their names etched on a new museum wing, but are far less interested in the slow, unglamorous commitment of bankrolling artists’ lives. Money consolidates around prestige institutions while whole generations of working‑class creators are left to self‑fund or give up.

The result is a socially stratified creative class drawn from a narrow band of schools and postcodes. That doesn’t mean wealthy people make bad art. It means they make art from what they know, and when only one slice of society is making the work, culture feels like it isn’t talking to the rest of us.

Every person pushed out of creative life by precarity is a voice we never hear. There is no monument to the unmade film or the unwritten novel. The loss is invisible, but it accumulates.

Curiosity for a Caring, Flexible Mind

Curiosity isn’t just for artists. It’s how the brain keeps itself supple. Our capacity for neuroplasticity persists into old age, but only if we feed it real novelty. It needs fresh skills, new ideas, and unfamiliar people, not the same routines. When we meet challenges with the question, “What’s going on here, and what can I learn?” instead of “How do I escape this?”, we recruit neural networks that support cognitive flexibility instead of locking into threat mode. Over time, that perspective builds cognitive reserve, making us more resilient in the face of stress and better able to navigate the trials of later life.

Curiosity is also the root emotion of empathy. When we stay genuinely interested in other people’s inner worlds, we slow down snap judgments and engage the brain’s perspective‑taking circuits. It becomes much harder to flatten people into stereotypes or out-group them into enemies.

When Wonder Dividends are Hoarded

There is a particular perversity to the inequality of curiosity. The resilience and empathy dividends of a curious life are, in our current system, funnelled toward the group least inclined to put them to collective use. The “class–compassion gap” is well documented. People with fewer resources rely more on interdependence and mutual aid, so they tend to show stronger prosocial behaviour and more compassionate responses. The very wealthy, however, are cloistered from needing the support of their community and skew toward self‑focus and less empathy for people outside their own circle.

We have engineered a system that denies this incredible socially generative gift — a curious, flexible, empathic mind — to the people most likely to turn it outward in service of others. We hand the brain‑stretching novelty and wonder dividends to those most insulated from the world’s difficulties and then look puzzled when our politics and culture feel so impoverished.

Radical Hope: A Small, Stubborn Case for Wonder

The good news is that curiosity does not require a patron, a trust fund, or a perfectly empty calendar — though all of those help. Often it just needs permission. Someone in your life insisting that lingering with an idea or writing a poem or taking up painting is not a waste of time.

Let me be that person.

I give you permission — in our homes, classrooms and workplaces — to refuse the idea that only the narrowest, safest, most optimised path is the respectable one. To honor the kid who asks too many questions as much as the one who finishes the worksheet fastest. To resist the reflex to steer a young person away from something “impractical”, and cherish the moment when their eyes light up with ideas the world tells them are crazy. And you can give others permission too. By modelling, in our own lives, the ordinary bravery of being a beginner — of being unsure, and nervous, and convinced it’s a waste of time, and sticking with it.

And we can treat the preconditions for a curious society — affordable housing, predictable work hours, public libraries and museums, secure incomes, good arts education — not just as economic policy, but as wonder policy. Those are the policies that decide whether curiosity stays a common birthright or becomes a luxury item.

Einstein so revered the emotion, he called it “holy curiosity,” adding, “I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.” The real question is whether we will protect the conditions that let everyone access their own passionate curiosity. A society that systematically underfunds curiosity will eventually find itself without the adaptive minds, empathic citizens, or creative culture it needs to survive what’s coming. A society that chooses otherwise — that treats wonder as a public good to be shared — is one we are still free to imagine and one we can start building together.

With wonder,

Follow Me

Why am I getting this email?

Good question!

You’re getting this email because you are on HATCH Analytics’s or Monica Parker’s mailing list.

If you don’t want to receive these emails, you can unsubscribe at the bottom.

(We do hope you stick around, though.)

Copyright ©*|CURRENT_YEAR|*  Monica C. Parker. All rights reserved.

Want to unsubscribe? That’s ok! We’re sad to see you go, but you’ll still be a part of our Wonderbringer community in spirit.

Mailing address:
10 Colosseum Terrace
London, UK NW1 4EB

Wonderbringers brings weekly nuggets of wonder to your mailbox every Wednesday,

with a deeper dive essay on the first Wednesday of every month.

Image by Jack Moreh

Some wonderbringers for me this week:

• The pain of perfectionism: “I can’t stand it when people talk about perfectionism as something positive. They don’t realize the deep human toll.”

• Why North Carolina is the most linguistically diverse U.S. state: And what Reconstruction, poverty and the boll weevil crisis has to do with it.

• Watch: We are one step closer to understanding whales. What now? CETI scientists have revealed that not only do sperm whale vocalizations sound like human vowels, they also behave like them, revealing pattern-like structures across several linguistic dimensions.

• Wondermaker of the week: Aaron Beggs, the Northern Irish runner who helped a man who collapsed trying to finish the Boston Marathon: “I just did it because I felt it was the right thing to do at that time. You’re just trying to be a nice human. It’s nice to be nice and help people out.”

With wonder,

Follow Me

Why am I getting this email?

Good question!

You’re getting this email because you are on HATCH Analytics’s or Monica Parker’s mailing list.

If you don’t want to receive these emails, you can unsubscribe at the bottom.

(We do hope you stick around, though.)

Copyright ©*|CURRENT_YEAR|*  Monica C. Parker. All rights reserved.

Want to unsubscribe? That’s ok! We’re sad to see you go, but you’ll still be a part of our Wonderbringer community in spirit.

Mailing address:
10 Colosseum Terrace
London, UK NW1 4EB

Wonderbringers brings weekly nuggets of wonder to your mailbox every Wednesday,

with a deeper dive essay on the first Wednesday of every month.

Photo by Burst

Some wonderbringers for me this week:

• Albert Camus on love and the absurd: “Love is not just a confrontation with the absurdity of the world; it is a refusal to be broken by it. It is one of the ways we can be stronger than our rocks." - Albert Camus

• A lost generation of Einsteins (and Emily Dickinsons and Lin-Manuel Mirandas): What happens when only the rich can afford the luxury of creativity? “The best predictor of whether you’re going to become an inventor is your tax bracket.”

• BREAKING NEWS: Ever heard a beaver sneeze? You need to. Right now. (Really.)

• Wondermaker of the week: Joseph Nguthiru, 27yo founder of HyaPak, a Kenyan-based start-up that is transforming the water hyacinth plant into biodegradable alternatives for single-use plastic products.

With wonder,

Follow Me

Why am I getting this email?

Good question!

You’re getting this email because you are on HATCH Analytics’s or Monica Parker’s mailing list.

If you don’t want to receive these emails, you can unsubscribe at the bottom.

(We do hope you stick around, though.)

Copyright ©*|CURRENT_YEAR|*  Monica C. Parker. All rights reserved.

Want to unsubscribe? That’s ok! We’re sad to see you go, but you’ll still be a part of our Wonderbringer community in spirit.

Mailing address:
10 Colosseum Terrace
London, UK NW1 4EB

Hello Wonderseekers!

A HUGE thank you to all of you who participated in the survey! I am so touched by the kind things you said about what this newsletter means to you! I wanted to share the results with the community and then tell you a bit about how I will be taking your feedback on board.

Survey Results

On a scale of 1-10, with 1 being ‘not at all’ and 10 being ‘very much’, how enjoyable or useful do you find Wonderbringers? – 9.3

Why do you read Wonderbringers? (select all that apply)

• It helps me stay informed on social science and other wonder-related things - 53%

• It connects me to a community of like-minded people – 19%

• It helps me think differently about the world – 72%

• It gives me a feel-good moment during my week – 66%

• It gives me language for ideas I already feel but maybe couldn't articulate – 38%

What topics do you like to see covered? (select all that apply)

• The science of wonder, awe, and curiosity – 81%

• Books, ideas, and people worth knowing about – 85%

• Optimism, hope, and the psychology of positive change – 84%

• Practical tools for living and leading better – 56%

• Politics and civil society through a hopeful lens – 50%

Would you like to see the timing of the newsletter:

• Stay weekly – 25%

• Move to every other week – 46%

• Move to monthly – 19%

Would you like to see the format of the newsletter:

• Stay as it is (medium to long form intro with wonderbringing links) – 82%

• Be briefer (short form intro or no intro with wonderbringing links) – 6%

• Be longer (longer form essays with wonderbringing links) – 2%

If this newsletter moved to a new platform or service, what would matter most to you?

• That it still arrives in my email inbox – 47%

• That I can still easily manage my subscription – 3%

• That I can read it without having to sign up to a new service – 31%

• I don't mind — I'll follow wherever it goes  – 19%

On a scale of 1-10, with 1 being ‘not likely at all and 10 being ‘very likely’, how likely are you to recommend this newsletter to someone you know? – 9.2

Anything you’d like to change or like me to know?

• ‘Ways to connect with other wonder nerds!’

• ‘Other people who are inspiring, Maybe also 'wonder maker of the week'.’

Comments:

• ‘I'm grateful for the newsletter and for all the things I learn from it.’

• ‘It helps move humanity forward in the best possible way.’

• ‘It always makes me feel better after I read it.’

• ‘The only newsletter I actually do read regularly.’

• ‘Thought provoking, varied and inspirational. Thank you.’

• ‘THANK YOU for putting an absolute quality read into the world.’

• ‘I love all of your content! It is one of my favorite newsletters.’

Some Thoughts

I was surprised that most of you like the medium/long format! I assumed with our click-n-scroll world, everyone would prefer shorter. What also came through is that you'd like some time to let the ideas marinate, as you don't always have time to read them every week. I was also interested to see that half of you enjoy the occasional political or civil society slant, but really enjoy books, ideas and people worth knowing about. I also heard many calls for more connection with other wonderseekers, and even a chance to learn about some wondermakers!

Some Changes

The first change I’m making is moving the long-form essays to just the first Wednesday of every month, but still sending the Wonderbringer links each week. This way, you’ll still have a tiny weekly smile in your inbox, but can spend more time enjoying the longer monthly thoughts. The next change I’m making is to include some ‘Wondermakers’. These are people doing wonderful things to make the world better through hopeful action (which aligns nicely with a podcast project I hope to share soon!) Lastly, I will be moving the newsletter to another platform, which will add community features for those who want them, while still ensuring the newsletter lands in your inbox as it always has. (FYI, this will happen seamlessly for you—more on this when I’ve completed the move.)

I hope these changes help Wonderbringers evolve in a way that maintains its meaning for you while strengthening and growing the Wonderbringer community.

Some wonderbringers for me this week:

• The psychology of exploration: What motivates us to discover?

• Watch: The Ultimate Mix Tape: Making Voyager’s Golden Record.

  (also worth watching: Spaceman’s best friend: Adorable moment Artemis II astronaut is welcomed home by her dog.)

• Listen: Moonstruck: A song for Carroll.

Thank you again for taking the time to help make Wonderbringers the best it can be! Also, someone said they wanted to talk to me for their dissertation, but since the survey was anonymous, I’m not sure who. Feel free to get in touch! :)

With wonder,

Follow Me

Why am I getting this email?

Good question!

You’re getting this email because you are on HATCH Analytics’s or Monica Parker’s mailing list.

If you don’t want to receive these emails, you can unsubscribe at the bottom.

(We do hope you stick around, though.)

Copyright ©*|CURRENT_YEAR|*  Monica C. Parker. All rights reserved.

Want to unsubscribe? That’s ok! We’re sad to see you go, but you’ll still be a part of our Wonderbringer community in spirit.

Mailing address:
10 Colosseum Terrace
London, UK NW1 4EB

Hello Wonderseekers!

I, like most of the world, have been transfixed by the journey of Artemis II. The images being delivered back to Earth, combined with the very touching humanity of it all, have reminded me of what first triggered my fascination with wonderbringers. The wonder of space, and its impact on those who are fortunate enough to travel into its starry expanse, has always enthralled me. I thought this week I might share a story from my book, The Power of Wonder.  Rereading it, I was struck by the parallels to today. How our first glimpses of planet Earth from space served as an awe-inspiring unifying force during a particularly tumultuous period in our human history.  

***

In July of 1969, 600 million people watched the moon landing on television. That moment remains one of the largest shared human experiences ever. After that “giant leap for mankind,” the world was never quite the same again. This global transformation had already begun six months prior when, on Christmas Eve of 1968, Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders snapped a photo called Earthrise—a poignant image of Earth as a small, fragile marble suspended in inky dark. Borders erased, nations and nationalities almost nonsensical constructs, this image confronted our most deeply held beliefs about humankind’s place in the universe and set in motion a defining moment of the twentieth century.

Nineteen sixty-eight marked a period of massive turbulence worldwide—scenes of the Vietnam War beamed into homes, the May 68 student riots in Paris, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., followed by Robert Kennedy only two months later. Humanity was having a violent reckoning with itself. The Earthrise photo and seeing the whole Earth for the first time in human history jolted people out of their individual egoic concerns, turning their eyes heavenward. Earthrise (and a subsequent photo entitled Blue Marble) has since become the most widely disseminated image in human history, changing our relationship with this shared common home.  

Our journey into space changed humanity’s relationship with itself, but we Earthlings weren’t the only ones affected. The astronauts, upon returning, were fundamentally changed, too. When Apollo 9 Lunar Module pilot Russell “Rusty” Schweickart saw the Earth from space, he said, “From the moon, the Earth is so small and so fragile and such a precious little spot in that universe that you can block it out with your thumb. Then you realize that on that spot, that little blue and white thing, is everything that means anything to you—all of history and music and poetry and art and death and birth and love, tears, joy, games, all of it right there on that little spot that you can cover with your thumb. And you realize from that perspective that you’ve changed forever, that there is something new there, that the relationship is no longer what it was.”

Commander Schweickart was eloquently describing the “Overview Effect” and the metamorphic power of wonder. A term coined in 1987 by space writer Frank White, the Overview Effect describes the unexpected, powerful, and profound shift in perspective astronauts experience when they view the Earth from space.  White described those fundamental, enduring shifts as “truly transformative experiences involving senses of wonder and awe, unity with nature, transcendence, and universal brotherhood.”

And the astronauts were not oblivious to the challenges back home, nor the Overview Effect’s potential to unify across nations and ideologies. Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, who spent a record-breaking 166 days in space, explained it this way: “It was when I took a picture, actually, of Karachi, Pakistan, and I read what I wrote about it the next day, which was: ‘There are 6 million of us living in Pakistan.’ Six million of ‘us’? When is that no longer ‘them’? How did that part of the world, which I’ve never even been to, now, suddenly, because of the cumulative effect of where I am, start to feel like us? I think that’s when the world became one place for me.”

Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell put it a bit more succinctly, saying, “From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.’”

***

Look at that, indeed. Wishing Artemis II a safe return home to our little blue dot. Thank you for reminding us once again of our shared humanity and innate sense of wonder.

Some wonderbringers for me this week:

• In an echo of Apollo 8: NASA’s Artemis II astronauts capture stunning ‘Earthrise’ and ‘Earthset’.

• An incredibly weird time to be alive: The world witnessed the best and worst of humanity in a single week.

• The ‘panzoic effect’: The benefits of thinking about alien life.

Next week, I’ll be sharing the results from the Wonderbringers readers’ survey and some changes for the future. Thanks again to everyone who participated!

With wonder,

Follow Me

Why am I getting this email?

Good question!

You’re getting this email because you are on HATCH Analytics’s or Monica Parker’s mailing list.

If you don’t want to receive these emails, you can unsubscribe at the bottom.

(We do hope you stick around, though.)

Copyright ©*|CURRENT_YEAR|*  Monica C. Parker. All rights reserved.

Want to unsubscribe? That’s ok! We’re sad to see you go, but you’ll still be a part of our Wonderbringer community in spirit.

Mailing address:
10 Colosseum Terrace
London, UK NW1 4EB

Hello Wonderseekers!

On the morning of 1 April 1698, London was all abuzz. For weeks, word on the street had been brimming with excitement. Everyone had seen the posters all over town inviting them to come to the Tower of London to witness the annual washing of the lions. On the date, throngs of Londoners arrived, bustling through the streets in anticipation of this never-before-seen spectacle. What a treat they would all be in for!

Except, there were, of course, no lions being washed. There was no ceremony. There was only confusion. And then laughter. Followed by the slow, dawning realization that they had been hoodwinked. It is one of history's earliest recorded mass pranks, and one of the first to be documented specifically on April 1st.

The strange truth about April Fools' Day is that nobody really knows where it came from, and historians suspect we never will. The most popular theory traces it to 16th-century France, when King Charles IX decreed in 1564 that the new year would begin on January 1st rather than around Easter. Those who hadn't heard the news and kept celebrating in late March or early April became the “April fools,” sent on pointless errands and given fake gifts to tease them.

The French call it poisson d'avril, or ‘April's fish’, a term first recorded by poet Eloy d'Amerval as far back as 1508 (which, for me, brings to mind a favourite Monty Python sketch). Children in France still sneak paper fish onto the backs of unsuspecting adults, delighted when their target walks around unwittingly adorned with papier poissons.

It is a tradition that has outlasted empires, calendars, and centuries of upheaval, so what is it about April Fools that is so appealing? Psychologists who study humour have found that the act of crafting a good prank requires considerable mental effort. From withholding information from the target to imagining how they'll react and timing the reveal, that creative investment is part of what makes it so satisfying. But there's also something more primal at work.

Sociologist Giselinde Kuipers describes pranking as a moment of engineered superiority. You arrange a situation where, briefly, you know something another person doesn't. And when handled with warmth, rather than punching down, the prank acts as a bonding agent. The moment the target laughs, the hierarchy between the duped and the prankster dissolves, and what was a trick becomes a shared story and emblem of play.

Being fooled, even mildly, also triggers a flash of embarrassment that researchers suggest is adaptive. Feeling foolish diminishes our ego and lessens our sense of certainty, gently recalibrating our social alertness and reminding us that we are all, at some level, operating on incomplete information about the world.

There's a reason the Tower of London prank has survived 300 years in the retelling, while countless cruel hoaxes have been forgotten or condemned. The lions-washing prank asked nothing of its targets except a willingness to be curious. It didn't mock anyone's vulnerability or single out any one group to feel stupid. It simply invited people into a shared silliness. It laughed with them, not at them.

I recall a prank my father played on one of the nurses in his practice when I was little. She had gotten a new car specifically for its great fuel economy. My dad started topping up her gas tank just a bit every day, and she kept remarking how the gas mileage was out of this world! Then, my dad began siphoning gas out of her tank. (It was how I learned Bernoulli’s Principle!) She started coming into the office so frustrated that her car had suddenly stopped performing well. He let the prank go on for a good few weeks before confessing the joke to her. She thought it was hysterical, and they laughed about it for years. Done well, a prank isn't an act of dominance. It’s an act of intimacy. It says, ‘I know you well enough to play with you.’

And the laughter that follows is far from trivial. Research consistently shows that genuine laughter reduces cortisol, releases oxytocin, boosts immune responses, and is so effective that even forced laughter of 12 seconds or more a day is linked to improved well-being. A well-landed prank doesn't just amuse. It heals, if only briefly, the tension of daily life.

Some wonderbringers for me this week:

• Cottingley Fairies: How Sherlock Holmes's creator was fooled by hoax

• The four types of imagination and how they create our worlds:

  Your imagination isn't just one thing.

• Why adults need to make time for playtime: New studies suggest that play may be as essential to our health as sleep.

Happy April Fools' Day. May your pranks be warm, your targets willing, and your laughter healing to your playful inner child.

With wonder,

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Hello Wonderseekers!

Imagine this scene. You’ve been feeling burnt out. Overwhelmed by the news cycle. By the pressure to do too much. By a recalcitrant spring playing hide-and-seek behind winter’s gloomy gaze. Maybe there’s been a loss – of a job, of a person, of a dream. You’re caught in the bipolar emotional rip tide of depression and anxiety, currents shifting at will. Eventually, you decide you can’t tackle this season of discontent on your own, and you seek out your doctor. She listens, really listens, then reaches for her pad. In her barely legible scrawl she writes, “Take one pottery class stat. Repeat prn.”

It sounds like something out of speculative fiction, but it’s actually a glimpse of what could soon be happening across parts of the US. This month, Georgia became the first state to formally recognise the arts as mental health treatment. The legislature passed House Resolution 1007, acknowledging the arts as a mental‑health resource and laying the groundwork to steer future funding toward arts‑based programmes.

Georgia has already become a hub for “social prescribing” through Atlanta‑based Social Rx (formerly Art Pharmacy), which partners with clinics, Medicaid plans, and community groups serving anxious teens, isolated elders, and overworked carers. Doctors and mental‑health professionals can literally prescribe activities like dance classes, museum tours, ceramics workshops, botanical‑garden visits, or concerts as part of a care plan for anxiety, depression, and loneliness. Patients receive a set number of “doses” (for example, 12 arts or culture activities) and do not pay ticket or entry costs for those prescribed events. Underneath the beauty of this idea is solid evidence. These programmes are built on peer‑reviewed studies showing that arts engagement can ease mental health symptoms and strengthen social connections.

The Georgia Health Policy Center and the US National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health are now evaluating Social Rx’s “smart‑matching” technology, aiming for a form of precision medicine that matches people to the right arts experiences to improve mental health symptoms. The platform evaluates clinical needs (anxiety, social isolation, chronic illness), personal goals, and practical constraints, then cross‑references them with a mapped network of local arts and culture offerings. It also considers each person’s artistic preferences and curiosities — music vs ceramics, quiet museums vs lively performances — so matches resonate rather than feeling clinical or forced. From there, an algorithm recommends specific, evidence‑informed artistic activities that research suggests will help with that person’s particular mental health profile.

Georgia’s programme sits inside a wider NeuroArts and arts‑in‑health movement. Atlanta is one of 11 communities chosen for a national NeuroArts Coalition “Arts and Health Laboratory” exploring how creativity shapes brain health across our lifespan. And Georgia is not alone. In the UK and elsewhere, creative social prescribing is emerging as a new kind of integrative treatment, with organisations contending that arts and culture can help address unmet health needs as well as reduce increasingly pervasive loneliness and community fragmentation.

Maybe the most radical part of this shift is what it says about what we think people deserve. Not just relief from symptoms but wonder and beauty and connection. Not a luxury accessible to the privileged, but a necessity for thriving public health. If a state legislature can look at the data and decide that concerts and ceramics belong alongside counselling and medication, it raises a questionto ponder for the rest of us. What would it mean to treat creativity and culture as a critical component of our own health and wellness, rather than just an occasional treat?

Until policies catch up globally, you don’t need a prescription to start adding creative wonder to your health regimen. Consider this your unofficial Rx from me: take one small act of art, regularly, for as long as needed. 

Some wonderbringers for me this week:

• Creativity is about rebellion, not productivity: Imagination against monetization.

• What many Nobel laureates have in common: The hobbies and sidehustles of polymaths.

• Another “poorly behaved woman” making history (thanks to reader Mark!): Hortense Daman Clews – Teenage resistance heroine.

Thank you to everyone who took the Wonderbringers survey! I will be notifying via email the three winners of the free, signed copy of The Power of Wonder. I appreciate everyone who took the time to share their thoughts with me. (I’ll keep the survey open until the end of the week in case anyone else wants to take it just out of the goodness of their heart!)

With wonder,

Follow Me

Why am I getting this email?

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If you don’t want to receive these emails, you can unsubscribe at the bottom.

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Copyright ©2026  Monica C. Parker. All rights reserved.

Want to unsubscribe? That’s ok! We’re sad to see you go, but you’ll still be a part of our Wonderbringer community in spirit.

Mailing address:
10 Colosseum Terrace
London, UK NW1 4EB