Carrots and the Roots of Kindness, from Leo and Sophia Tolstoy to Ross Gay

A lovely reminder that “kindness and kin have the same mother.”

In the bleak Russian winter of 1902, Sofia Tolstoy filled her diary with anxieties about her husband’s health — “palpitations, difficulty in breathing, insomnia, general misery” — and his refusal to follow the protein-rich diet of fish and chicken his doctor had prescribed. Tolstoy refused to eat anything but vegetables. A decade earlier, in his incremental conquest of kindness — something he hadn’t always extended to his own wife ...