PhilosophyHow Nature Works, in Stunning Psychedelic Illustrations of Scientific Processes and Phenomena from a 19th-Century FrenchBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria PopovaA scrumptious quest “to satisfy that invincible tendency of our minds, which urges us on to understand the reason of things.” A century before the trailblazing photographer Berenice Abbott created her
Philosophy Viktor Frankl on Humor as a Lifeline to Sanity and SurvivalBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“Humor, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds.” “When one is considering the universe,” Ella Sanders
Philosophy Lord Byron’s Moving Elegy for His Beloved DogBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“To mark a friend’s remains these stones arise; / I never knew but one — and here he lies.” “I am because my little dog knows me,” Gertrude Stein wrote. Who hasn’t found in the eyes of a beloved dog the
Philosophy Underland: An Enchanting Journey into the Hidden Universe Beneath Our FeetBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“Into the underland we have long placed that which we fear and wish to lose, and that which we love and wish to save.” “To sense this world of waters known to the creatures of the sea we must shed our
Philosophy Against the Slippery Slope of Evil: Amanda Palmer Reads Wendell Berry’s Stunningly Prescient Poem “Questionnaire”Brain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria PopovaThe road to moral hell is paved with gradual self-permission. “Under conditions of terror,” Hannah Arendt wrote in her classic treatise on the normalization of evil, “most people will comply but some will
PhilosophyEating the Sun: A Lovely Illustrated Celebration of Wonder, the Science of How the Universe Works, and the Existential MysteryBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“When one is considering the universe, unseen matter, our small backyard of the stuff, I think it is important, sensible even, to try and find some balance between laughter and uncontrollable weeping.”
Philosophy How to Punctuate with Style: Lewis Thomas’s Charming Meditation on the Subtleties of LanguageBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“If you want to use a cliché you must take full responsibility for it yourself and not try to fob it off on anon., or on society.” Theodor Adorno celebrated punctuation as the “friendly spirits whose presence
PhilosophyNellie Bly Makes the News: An Animated Documentary About the Investigative Journalism Pioneer Who Paved the Way for WomenBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“Bly kept the same formula for success: Determine Right. Decide Fast. Apply Energy. Act with Conviction. Fight to the Finish. Accept the Consequences. Move on.” In 1885, at the age of only twenty, Nellie
Philosophy Trees at Night: Stunning Rorschach Silhouettes from the 1920sBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“Aside from the appearance of a tree by day or night, is it not kin of the human family with its roots in the earth and its arms stretching toward the sky as if to seek and to know the great mystery?”
Toni MorrisonBorders and Belonging: Toni Morrison’s Prescient Wisdom on the Refugee Struggle, the Violence of Otherness, and the MeaningBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“It may be that the most defining characteristic of our times is that, again, walls and weapons feature as prominently now as they once did in medieval times.” What does home mean and where do we anchor
PhilosophyFaster Than Light: Marilyn Nelson Reads Her Exquisite Poem About the Purpose of Life and How Our Impermanence Both FrustratesBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“My poems: a handful of dust trying to get back to supernova. Like every longing, everything alive.” “It’s so much more a thing of pliancy, persuasion,” the astronomer and poet Rebecca Elson wrote in spare,
Stereotypes The Antidote to Prejudice: Walter Lippmann on Overriding the Mind’s Propensity for PreconceptionsBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“There is a taint on any contact between two people which does not affirm as an axiom the personal inviolability of both.” “We hear and apprehend only what we already half know,” Thoreau wrote as he contemplated
Philosophy Trailblazing 19th-Century Astronomer Maria Mitchell on Social Change and the Life of the MindBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“Reformers are apt to forget… that the world is not made up entirely of the wicked and the hungry, there are persons hungry for the food of the mind, the wants of which are as imperious as those of the
Philosophy Relationship Happiness and Your DNA: How One Gene Encodes Emotional SensitivityBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria PopovaInside the nuanced science of serotonin and the underappreciated upside of being a sensitive creature. “An honorable human relationship — that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word
Philosophy Meditations on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp: Polish Painter Józef Czapski on Literature, Survival, and the Human SoulBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“The slow and painful transformation of a passionate and narrowly egotistical being into a man who gives himself over wholly to some great work or other that devours him, destroys him, lives in his blood,
Children's Books What If: An Illustrated Celebration of the Utopian Imagination and the Will to Change the WorldBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria PopovaTo be or not to be, bravely answered through the lens of could be. “The present is not a potential past; it is the moment of choice and action,” Simone de Beauvoir wrote. At bottom, choice and action begin
PhilosophyThe Lioness in the Tall Grass: Farmer and Poet Laura Brown-Lavoie’s Extraordinary Letter to Children About the Power ofBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria PopovaIn praise of sentences that pull you in with all their teeth. “Literature,” Vladimir Nabokov wrote in his insightful meditation on storytelling, “was born not the day when a boy crying wolf, wolf came
PhilosophyPoetic Symbology of the Heroine’s Journey: Artist Nancy Castille’s Stunning Homage to the Sumerian Proto-Feminist GoddessBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova5,000-year-old poems celebrating female sexuality and empowerment, reimagined in a new symbolic language at the nexus of beauty, wonder, and wisdom. “We die. That may be the meaning of life,” Toni Morrison
Philosophy Lorraine Hansberry, the Love of Freedom, and the Freedom of LoveBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“Ahead of her time, Lorraine’s witness and wisdom help us understand the world, its problems and its possibilities. In her lonely reckonings, her impassioned reaching for justice, and the seriousness her
Philosophy Leo Tolstoy on Kindness and the Measure of LoveBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“Nothing can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness.” “Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you’re already in heaven now,” Jack Kerouac
ConsciousnessAltered States of Consciousness: The Neuropsychology of How Time Perception Modulates Our Experience of Self, from DepressionBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“The brain does not simply represent the world in a disembodied way as an intellectual construct… Our mind is body-bound. We think, feel, and act with our body in the world. All experience is embedded
Is There a God? Stephen Hawking Gives the Definitive Answer to the Eternal QuestionBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“Every formula which expresses a law of nature is a hymn of praise to God,” the trailblazing astronomer and leading Figuring figure Maria Mitchell wrote in the second half of the nineteenth century as
Children's Books Do You See What I See? A Poetic Vintage Art-Science Primer on the Building Blocks of the Perceptual WorldBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria PopovaA lovely illustrated serenade to a world strewn with “lines making patterns of beauty.” “To see takes time, like to have a friend takes time,” Georgia O’Keeffe reflected in the spring of her visionary
A New Vocabulary of Attention: Iris Murdoch on Reimagining Freedom, Moral Progress, Aloneness, and Our Inner LivesBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“The connection between art and the moral life has languished because we are losing our sense of form and structure in the moral world itself… We need a new vocabulary of attention.” “Man cannot stand
The Universe in Verse: Cosmologist and Saxophonist Stephon Alexander Reads “Explaining Relativity” by Astronomer and PoetBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria PopovaWhen Einstein radicalized science with his theory of relativity, the fulcrum of which shifted our understanding of reality more profoundly than anything since the Copernican reordering of the universe,
Philosophy The Fascinating Science of How Trees Communicate, AnimatedBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“Trees are the foundation of forests, but a forest is much more than what you see.” “The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way,” William
Visionary Maps of Time, Space, and Thought by America’s First Female Cartographer and Information Visualization DesignerBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria PopovaRevolutions in design and education technology, underpinned by the conviction that women “are an essential part of the body politic, whose corruption or improvement must affect the whole.” “The everywhere
Ecologist and Philosopher David Abram on the Language of Nature and the Secret Wisdom of the More-Than-Human WorldBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human.” “We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals,” the great nature writer Henry Beston wrote in 1928
Philosophy Middle Age and the Art of Self-Renewal: An Extraordinary Letter from Pioneering Education Reformer Elizabeth PeabodyBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“The perilous time for the most highly gifted is not youth… The perilous season is middle age, when a false wisdom tempts them to doubt the divine origin of the dreams of their youth….” “A self that goes
Borderless Lullabies: Musicians and Authors in Defense of Refugee ChildrenBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria PopovaA reading from “Figuring” with original music by Yo-Yo Ma, a stunning rendition of the 19-century parlor song “Beautiful Dreamer” by Esperanza Spalding, and a family of friends speaking out against injustice
