This is the 10% happier podcast, Dan Harris.

Hey everybody, this was an extremely fun interview for me.

I do not think it's very controversial to assert that Jennifer Senior is one of our

finest living journalists.

If you haven't heard of her, she's a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Before that, she spent many years at The New York Times and before that at New York magazine.

So she's basically done a triumphant tour of some of my favorite publications in the world.

She's written about all kinds of stuff, including politics and science, but she has a really special

knack for writing articles about the human condition that go massively viral.

One such hit was a lengthy and extremely moving piece for The Atlantic that won a Pulitzer prize.

It was about a young man who died on September 11th and the wildly varying ways in which his

loved ones experienced grief. That article, which was called What Bobby McElvan Left Behind,

has now been turned into a book, which is called On Grief, Love, Loss and Memory.

In this interview, we spent a lot of time talking about this truly fascinating yarn,

but we also talk about some of Jennifer's other articles, including one about an eminent

happiness researcher who died by suicide, another about why friendships so often break up,

and finally a truly delightful piece about the puzzling gap between how old we actually are,

and how old we think we are. I should also say that Jennifer wrote an entire book about parenting,

which is called All Joy and No Fun, which we also reference a bit throughout this conversation.

Before we get started with today's episode, if you've been around TPH land for any length of time,

you've probably heard me name drop Joseph Goldstein. He started out as my meditation teacher,

then became my friend, and then we teamed up to help start the 10% happier meditation app.

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