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December 2024
The Sun Interview
Old Souls
Jim Tucker on Children’s Memories of Past Lives
Askey: This is perhaps an ontological question, but do you think James Huston became James Leininger, or is there some other entity—some consciousness, some soul—that was once James Huston and is now James Leininger?
Tucker: The latter much more than the former, I think. We can only speculate, but to my mind there may well be this larger self that has different lifetimes. It’s a core that continues, though the people it inhabits are different. I use the analogy of actors in movies. When you see Jimmy Stewart in a movie, it’s undeniably Jimmy Stewart, and yet he can play very different characters.
Fiction
The Wind Phone
The prairie grass has always drawn things into its orbit. I’ve seen rabbits hide among the bluestem, and the occasional red fox, and after every storm there are objects that blow or float past and entangle themselves in the switchgrass and fescue. . . . Tonight, a windy September evening, a shiny new object has appeared in my yard, like a loose mylar balloon blown by the wind.
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
The Work We Do
I can’t believe it took me so long to hold myself accountable for how much my life actually costs. Forty-two feels incredibly, abnormally late to realize that, yes, time is money. And, conversely, money is time—time that someone, somewhere worked.
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
My Ghost Fleet
I have spent hours in attics, the kind reached by pulling a rope in the ceiling and ascending to a stagnant room. It was in attics that I found love letters tied with ribbons, and wedding dresses in paper boxes the size of coffins, and sepia photographs of uncles in uniform and children who’d died of scarlet fever. I sifted through images of wraparound porches and white chickens, three-legged dogs and men with cigars. I think there is a reason why the past collects in attics: heavily, above us.
