In ‘Crossing the Floods’, our contributors explore what it means to live with suffering rather than evade it, drawing inspiration from the Buddhist parable that gives this issue its name. Essays by Havi Carel, Kaitlyn Creasy, Kathleen Higgins, and Rebekah Humphreys examine how illness, loneliness, aesthetic life, and animal suffering shape our experience of the world, while David Loy and Boris Sotomayor reflect on the unreality of the self and the pressures of self-optimization. The issue also includes conversations between Mariana Alessandri and Kieran Setiya on dark moods; Samir Chopra and Maryam Aghdami on existential anxiety; and Matthew Ratcliffe and Kathleen Higgins on the nature of grief.

The general section features writing by Maryam Aghdami on language, agency, and marginalization; Rebecca Buxton on the tensions between privacy and self-disclosure in research; and Hossein Dabbagh and Patrick Hassan on the moral paradoxes of regime change, as well as conversations between Timothy Morton and Heather King on teaching humanities to STEM students and between Kathleen Murphy-Hollies and Rosa Ritunnano on returning to reality by way of delusion. With artwork by Emma Fielden, Artur Majka, Sun Smith-Forêt, and Hanae Utamura, ‘Crossing the Floods’ is a provocation to thought as well as a wide-ranging meditation on suffering and how we might cross its waters together.