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West Africa
The Mesmerizing Microscopy of Trees: Otherworldly Images Revealing the Cellular Structure of Wood Specimens
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Stunning images that occupy the lacuna between art and science. After a recent march in D.C., where I walked Walt Whitman’s love of democracy and his conviction that “America, if eligible at all to downfall
Ursula K. Le Guin
Ursula K. Le Guin on Time, the Meaning of Loyalty, and Why Honoring the Continuity of Past and Future Is the Root of Acting
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“If time and reason are functions of each other, if we are creatures of time, then we had better know it, and try to make the best of it. To act responsibly.” “Progress is never permanent, will always
Heroism
A Stunning Illustrated Celebration of the Wilderness and the Human Role in Nature Not as Conqueror but as Humble Witness
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“It is said that the forest has a certain limit if you look straight ahead, but the sides are boundless.” “When we have learned how to listen to trees,” Hermann Hesse wrote in his lyrical love letter our
Borges on Turning Trauma, Misfortune, and Humiliation into Raw Material for Art
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“All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.” “Forget your personal tragedy,” Ernest
EPA
Pioneering Conservationist Mardy Murie on Nature, Human Nature, and the Wealth of the Wilderness
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“Beauty is a resource in and of itself… I hope the United States of America is not so rich that she can afford to let these wildernesses pass by — or so poor she cannot afford to keep them.” “After you
Playwrights
Anton Chekhov’s 6 Rules for a Great Story
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Mastering the essential complementarity of compassion and total objectivity. “Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted,” Kurt Vonnegut offered in
Loving vs. Being in Love: Jane Welsh Carlyle on Navigating the Heart’s Contradictions
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“A passion, like the torrent in the violence of its course, might perhaps too, like the torrent, leave ruin and desolation behind… My love for you… is deep and calm, more like the quiet river, which refreshes
African-American News
Little Man, Little Man: James Baldwin’s Only Children’s Book, Celebrating the Art of Seeing and Black Children’s Self-Esteem
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“A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled. A child cannot be taught by anyone whose demand, essentially, is that the child repudiate his experience.”
Beavers
The Scientific Poetics of Affection: Lewis Thomas on Altruism and Why We Are Wired for Friendship
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“Left to ourselves, mechanistic and autonomic, we hanker for friends… Maybe altruism is our most primitive attribute, out of reach, beyond our control.” “There is in us a deeply seated response to the
Creative Work
How to Break Up with Integrity: Rilke on Unwounding Separation and the Difficult Art of Recalibrating Broken Relationships
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“Nothing locks people in error as much as the daily repetition of error.” We speak of love as a gift, but although it may come at first unbidden, as what Percy Shelley called a “speechless swoon of joy,”
Alice In Wonderland
Presto & Zesto in Limboland: A Lovely and Unusual “New” Maurice Sendak Book Elegizing a Lost Friendship
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A posthumously discovered treasure from the patron saint of children’s books emanating existential consolation for the trauma of living. This article originally appeared in The New York Times Book Review
American Philosophy
An Antidote to White Male Capitalist Culture: Adrienne Rich on the Liberating Power of Storytelling and How Reading Emancipates
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“The decline in adult literacy means not merely a decline in the capacity to read and write, but a decline in the impulse to puzzle out, brood upon… argue about, turn inside-out in verbal euphoria, the
Creative Work
Cybernetics Pioneer Norbert Wiener on the Malady of “Content” and How to Save Creative Culture from the Syphoning of Substance
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“When there is communication without need for communication, merely so that someone may earn the social and intellectual prestige of becoming a priest of communication, the quality and communicative value
Nightlife
Beasts of India: Stunning Illustrations of Indigenous Animals Depicted in Various Tribal Art Traditions
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A vibrant menagerie at the nexus of nature and culture. In his insightful inquiry into why we look at animals, John Berger lauded non-human creatures as “the objects of our ever-extending knowledge.” have
North Pole
Physicist Alan Lightman on the Illusion of Absolute Rest
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The beautiful and disorienting science of why we are mostly restlessness and empty space. In his timeless elegy for time, T.S. Eliot wrote of “the still point of the turning world” — one of the most beautiful
Emily Dickinson
We Grow Accustomed to the Dark: Emily Dickinson’s Stunning Ode to Resilience, Animated
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A timeless serenade to finding light amid the “Evenings of the Brain.” How do we survive the unsurvivable? What is that inextinguishable flame that goes on flickering in the bleak, dark chamber of our
John Steinbeck
The Only Story in the World: John Steinbeck on Kindness, Good and Evil, the Wellspring of Good Writing
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“Try to understand men, if you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and nearly always leads to love.” “All the goodness and the heroisms will rise
Creative Work
Walt Whitman on Creativity
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Wisdom “for strong artists and leaders—for fresh broods of teachers… and coming musicians.” “The most regretful people on earth,” Mary Oliver wrote in her beautiful reflection on the central commitment
Japanese Artist Ryota Kajita’s Otherworldly Photographs of Ice Formation in Alaska
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A visual serenade to one of the most beautiful and seemingly miraculous phenomena of the physical universe. The pioneering naturalist John Muir held the poetic conviction that when we look closely at aspect
Henry David Thoreau
Consider the Tree: Philosopher Martin Buber on the Discipline of Not Objectifying and the Difficult Art of Seeing Others
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“Let no attempt be made to sap the strength from the meaning of the relation: relation is mutual.” When Walt Whitman contemplated the wisdom of trees, he saw in them qualities “almost emotional, palpably
Nobel Prize
Toni Morrison on the Deepest Meaning of Freedom
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In praise of loving anything and anyone you choose to love. “Everything can be taken from a man,” Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl wrote in his timeless treatise on the human search for meaning, “but thing:
Women's News
The Woman Who Smashed Codes: The Untold Story of Cryptography Pioneer Elizebeth Friedman
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How an unsung heroine established a new field of science and helped defeat the Nazis with pencil, paper, and perseverance. While computing pioneer Alan Turing was breaking Nazi communication in England,
Existentialism
You Belong Here: An Illustrated Antidote to Our Existential Homelessness
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Sweet consolation for the lifelong alienation that afflicts each of us at different times and in different measures. There is hardly a more elemental human need than our need for belonging — in a place,
T.S. Eliot
Jeanette Winterson’s 10 Tips on Writing
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“Turn up for work. Discipline allows creative freedom. No discipline equals no freedom.” In 2010, inspired by Elmore Leonard’s classic 10 Rules of Writing published nearly a decade earlier, The Guardian
Creative Work
The Difficult Art of Giving Space in Love: Rilke on Freedom, Togetherness, and the Secret to a Good Marriage
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“I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other.” “Love one another but make not a bond of love: let it rather be a moving
Stephen Hawking
What We Imagine Knowledge to Be: James Gleick Reads Elizabeth Bishop
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“If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter, then briny, then surely burn your tongue. It is like what we imagine knowledge to be: dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free, drawn from the cold hard of
Nobel Prize
Against the Illusion of Separateness: Pablo Neruda’s Beautiful and Humanistic Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech
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“There is no insurmountable solitude. All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence in order to reach forth the
Water: A Stunning Celebration of the Element of Life Based on Indian Folklore
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“We need nature — water, sun, air — to survive, but she doesn’t really need us. She is generous to us, but she has some conditions, and we have to respect them.” “Like all profound mysteries, it is so
Psychedelia
Literary Ecstasy: Virginia Woolf Describes a Psychedelic Experience
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“All our most violent passions, and art and religion, are the reflections which we see in the dark hollow at the back of the head when the visible world is obscured for the time.” “Our normal waking consciousness,”
Epictetus on Love and Loss: The Stoic Strategy for Surviving Heartbreak
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“Who is good if he knows not who he is? and who knows what he is, if he forgets that things which have been made are perishable, and that it is not possible for one human being to be with another always?”