
Why a Daily Dose of Awe Might Just Be the New Prozac
On a family trip to San Francisco last spring, I was delighted to find that a survey of paintings by Alice Neel—the late, great portraitist of ordinary people—was showing at the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park.... I expected to be engaged by Neel’s beautiful loose lines and off-kilter compositions. I did not anticipate, though, the full-on electric soul-charge I experienced in those gallery rooms.