brain pickings books

Here are 20 books, from poetry to science, that helped me survive this discomposing year – I hope they help you, too. This so-called "children's" book by Shel Silverstein is actually one of the subtlest, profoundest things ever written about love and the secret to healthy, happy relationships A bite-sized companion to Brain Pickings by Maria Popova. We forget, too, just how much of life’s miraculousness resides in the latitude of the spectrum of experience and our dance across it, how much of life’s vibrancy radiates from the contrast between the various hues, between the darkness and the light. “Everything else… is child’s play; we must first of all answer the question.”. His specialty was fish, and he spent his days sailing the globe in search of new species. Quotes from beloved books, each thematically matched with a song. For a taste, here is Hirshfield reading one of the poems from the book, “Today, Another Universe,” at the 2020 Universe in Verse: TODAY, ANOTHER UNIVERSE She writes: When in pursuit of a black hole, you are not looking for a material object. and just for a minute She entered it as a psychologist on a philosophical inquiry — how often are we actually in control when we think we are, how do we navigate uncertain situations with incomplete information, and how can we ever separate the product of our own efforts from the strokes of randomness governing the universe? This time it's Brian Pickings: The 13 Best Science and Technology Books of 2013, The 13 Best Biographies, Memoirs, and History Books of 2013, The 13 Best Psychology and Philosophy Books … LATEST. To rejoice in the complexity of things. would you understand? “Books feed and cure and chortle and collide.” Remembering Gwendolyn Brooks, who died 20 years ago today, with her forgotten vintage poem about the power of reading brainpickings.org Audre Lorde, Keith Haring, Bruce Lee, chance, love, black holes, constraint as a catalyst of creativity, and a whisper of Whitman. There is, after all, something eminently uninteresting about a perpetually blue sky. Black holes are so magnetic largely because they defy our animal intuitions about reality, about the everythingness of everything. A side project by Maria Popova. The night falls. Brain Pickings has a free Sunday digest of the week's most interesting and inspiring articles across art, science, philosophy, creativity, children's books, and other strands of … I grew attuned to the echoes of his sensibility bellowing down the corridor of time, reverberating strongly in the work of established artists in my own community. “every true theorist is a kind of tamed metaphysicist.”, “the drama of a storm in nature, the drama of sorrow in life”, transcendent encounter with a violent storm, autumn light and finding beauty in impermanence, “Life is a dream. Essential Life-Learnings from 14 Years of Brain Pickings, Singularity: Marie Howe’s Ode to Stephen Hawking, Our Cosmic Belonging, and the Meaning of Home, in a Stunning Animated Short Film, The Cosmic Miracle of Trees: Astronaut Leland Melvin Reads Pablo Neruda’s Love Letter to Earth’s Forests, How Kepler Invented Science Fiction and Defended His Mother in a Witchcraft Trial While Revolutionizing Our Understanding of the Universe, Emily Dickinson’s Electric Love Letters to Susan Gilbert, Rebecca Solnit’s Lovely Letter to Children About How Books Solace, Empower, and Transform Us, Fixed vs. Growth: The Two Basic Mindsets That Shape Our Lives, In Praise of the Telescopic Perspective: A Reflection on Living Through Turbulent Times, A Stoic’s Key to Peace of Mind: Seneca on the Antidote to Anxiety, The Courage to Be Yourself: E.E. Although science is Greene’s raw material in this fathoming — its histories, its theories, its triumphs, its blind spots — he emerges, as one inevitably does in contemplating these colossal questions, a testament to Einstein’s conviction that “every true theorist is a kind of tamed metaphysicist.” Looking back on how he first grew enchanted with what he calls “the romance of mathematics” and its seductive promise to unveil the timeless laws of nature, he writes: Creativity constrained by logic and a set of axioms dictates how ideas can be manipulated and combined to reveal unshakable truths. Chaos is the only sure thing in this world. Working as a historian of science revealed to me how we have always unconsciously and inevitably viewed the natural world as a mirror of ourselves, reflecting our own world-view and our own needs, thoughts and hopes. For a taste of the book, all the author’s proceeds from which go toward the Equal Justice Initiative and New York’s COVID-19 emergency relief fund, here is Smith on love, habit, and creativity. Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life (public library) by Radiolab alum and Invisibilia co-creator Lulu Miller is a surprising book, an unclassifiable book — my kind of book. See more at the link. “We carry accumulation of years in our bodies and on our faces, but generally our real selves, the children inside, are still innocent and shy as magnolias.” In that same cultural season, from a college commencement stage, Toni Morrison told an orchard of human saplings that “true adulthood is a difficult beauty, an intensely hard won glory.”. Brain Pickings has a free Sunday digest of the week's most interesting and inspiring articles across art, science, philosophy, creativity, children's books, and other strands of … In a sentiment that bellows from the hallways of history into the great vaulted temple of timeless truth, he writes: Everything depends on the individual human being, regardless of how small a number of like-minded people there is, and everything depends on each person, through action and not mere words, creatively making the meaning of life a reality in his or her own being. the bond of live things everywhere. Best of Brain Pickings 2012 The most shared books in 2012 from Brain Pickings. After looking back on my Brain-pickings piece, I can see some definite changes I wanted to make. Reading Zadie Smith is always a rapture, but it has been especially rapturous to press the mind’s ear to her Intimations (public library) this year — a slender collection of six symphonic essays spanning love, death, justice, creativity, identity — everything worth thinking about and writing about, everything we live with and live for. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. Too many posts? “Cultural curation” that will, at the very least, introduce you to new ideas and perspectives and, at its very best, help you think more, laugh more, do more. Maria Popova Ping Zhu children's books art illustration Enchanted Lion science biology genetics love nonfiction children's books children's nonfiction history and literature lit science and technology. You can beam some bit-love my way: 197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7. The Blue Hour: A Stunning Illustrated Celebration of Nature’s Rarest Color ...with a side of Virginia Woolf's elated infatuation. So slight a thing? The city’s electric grid was snapped and uprooted — in the below-freezing cold, in the descending dusk, all power went out. Van Gogh knew this when he contemplated “the drama of a storm in nature, the drama of sorrow in life” as essential fuel for art and life. It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I would look up to savor its mirth between math equations and domestic disquietudes. — a question that turns the mind into a Rube Goldberg machine of other questions: Why is there something rather than nothing? If you're a fan of Brain Pickings (http://www.brainpickings.org/) — or you just enjoy reading books about creativity, psychology, spirituality, design, and art — this is the book club for you. Today, for some, a universe will vanish. Kalman introduces the book with her spare and singular poetics: Alice met Gertrude. Radiating from this lyrical odyssey of science, from this savage passion for understanding, is the subtle and stubborn insistence that the elementary laws are not something separate from us, are not alluring abstractions, are not playthings of the mind, but are the making and unmaking of us sensecrafting creatures — creatures that cohered from particles that cohered into molecules that cohered into minds capable of parsing information, capable of wresting from it conjectures about the elementary laws, capable of writing poems and postulates about the nature of reality and our place in it. https://www.brainpickings.org/2020/12/19/favorite-books-2020/ But while his strange and cautionary story backbones the book, it is ribbed with larger ideas: questions about the vain and touchingly human impulse to manufacture order out of elemental chaos, about the colossal blind spots that plague even the greatest visionaries, about the limiting yet necessary artifice of categories by which we attempt to navigate a world of continua and indivisibilia, about our pursuit of timeless truth against the backdrop of our own inevitable and heartbreaking temporality. That distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births thought as dream births concept, as feeling births idea, as knowledge births (precedes) understanding. I can’t help but read it in consonance with Pico Iyer’s soulful meditation on autumn light and finding beauty in impermanence, drawn from his many years in Japan. In this piece, I discuss what makes a best book and I also use my personal best book as an example. … His name was David Starr Jordan, and in many ways, it was his day job to fight Chaos. Need to cancel a recurring donation? Undergirding the century-long quest to unravel those secrets is a testament to the fundaments of creativity — a celebration of deliberate constraint as the fulcrum of revolutions. Having devoted five years of doctoral work, with the creator of the famous Marshmallow Experiment as her advisor, to designing and performing psychology experiments probing how people’s perception of control in situations dictated by pure chance shapes decision-making and outcomes, she was suddenly life-thrust into a much more intimate empiricism. ... a collection of original letters to children about why we read and how books shape our character by 121 of the most interesting people in our world, each illustrated by a great children’s book artist. Subscribe to this free midweek pick-me-up for heart, mind, and spirit below — it is separate from the standard Sunday digest of new pieces: I have moved through this fourteenth year of Brain Pickings — a devastating year for the world we share, a discomposing year for my private world — by leaning on the writings and wisdom of the long-gone for succor, for calibration of perspective, for the beauty that makes life livable. “Let me be as urgent as a knife, then, / and remind you of Keats, / so single of purpose and thinking, for a while, / he had a lifetime.”. Twitter: @explorer. Brain Pickings. will replace it. His own life was spared by the tightly braided lifeline of chance, choice, and character. Brain Pickings. A coup de foudre What emerges, above all, is the radiant warmth of her personhood — this person of such uncommon imagination, warmhearted humor, and stubborn buoyancy of spirit, always so thoroughly herself, who as a young woman had declared to her mother: I’ve got to become free myself if I’m to be free in my painting. Chaos will rot your plants and kill your dog and rust your bike. : The Shaking of an All-American City, A Voice That Held It Together (public library). Great books help us live. An inventory of cross-disciplinary interestingness, spanning art, science, design, history, philosophy, and more. How I would love for a writer to submit a story like this for my magazine: Urban Iran: A Rare Look at Iran’s Street Art Scene. A century after the great nature writer Henry Beston insisted that we need “a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals,” observing how “in a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear,” Macfarlane and Morris bring us the mystery and wisdom of wild things as complementary and consolatory to our tame incompleteness. To understand that your way of looking at the world is not the only one. I have moved through this fourteenth year of Brain Pickings — a devastating year for the world we share, a discomposing year for my private world — by leaning on the … Your support makes all the difference. Here's an example. Gertrude met Alice. “Some books are toolkits you take up to fix things, from the most practical to the most mysterious, from your house to your heart, or to make things, from cakes to ships. the iron bedpot. Most of all I hope my work is about a thing that seems to me of the deepest possible importance in our present-day historical moment: finding ways to recognise and love difference. I knew nothing about their creator beyond the name on the back of the clamshell: Keith Haring (May 4, 1958–February 16, 1990). this hole of light in the light, the puzzled birds swerving around it. A generation later, this spirit comes ablaze anew in If You Come to Earth (public library) by Sophie Blackall — one of the most beloved picture-book makers of our time and one of those rare artists, so few in any given generation, whose work of great talent and great tenderness is bound to be cherished for epochs to come. And in between... there is the blue hour." Walls came unseamed and reseamed before disbelieving eyes that had not yet computed, for it was beyond the computational power of everyday consciousness, what was taking place. She is most widely known for her blog, Brain Pickings, an online publication that she has fought to maintain advertisement-free, which features her writing on books, and ideas from the arts, philosophy, … Gertrude wrote this book of It wasn’t, of course, Alice’s autobiography, or even her biography — rather, it was the biography of their love, of early-twentieth-century Paris, of the community of visionary artists and writers who orbited the couple and who came to be known as the Lost Generation — a term Gertrude Stein coined — as they found themselves, in every sense of the term, at Alice and Gertrude’s salons. Dignity, Daring, and Disability: The Pioneering Queer Composer and Defiant Genius Ethel Smyth on Making Music While Going Deaf. Some through humor. Human infants are born with craniums made up of four plates that have not yet knit together into a solid dome so that their heads can compress to fit through the birth canal, so that the brain within can then expand. Nature remains; to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons — the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night. A mere eleven months after surviving the unsurvivable, Frankl took up the elemental question at the heart of Camus’s philosophical parable in a set of lectures, which he himself edited into a slim, potent book published in Germany in 1946, just as he was completing Man’s Search for Meaning. It does not belong to us alone. Better: a black hole is a spacetime. Be a better person. It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. A bite-sized companion to Brain Pickings by Maria Popova. The seams of these plates are intricate, like fingers interlaced, like the meander of arctic rivers across tundra. Favorite Children’s Books of 2019. soul, All Votes Add Books To This List. — It’s not if, it’s when. The shadow that slips The red squirrels’ eighty-foot playground. then just another silence. Inside them, books toppled from their shelves to take rapid turns levitating from the floor, flames engulfed school science labs as chemicals crumpled together, and cast-iron pots of moose stew jumped off kitchen stoves. By Maria Popova. Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus. Like Alice disguised her memoir of their love as a cookbook, Gertrude disguised hers as an “autobiography” of the beloved under the lover’s byline. I am not and have never been a reviewer of books — a person who surveys the landscape of literature with the goal of evaluating its features. Accept the black hole as a bare event horizon, a curved empty spacetime, a sparse vacuity… A glorious void, an empty venue, an extreme, spare stage, markedly austere but, yes, able to support big drama when the stage is occupied. 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Labor has enlarged and enriched your own life this year, please aiding! Bewilderment after the glacier, the species, the uniquely human tightly braided lifeline of chance choice... The wildest song is our only means of survival of Brain Pickings age of observational astronomy uninteresting a... Axe for the glittering world of non-human life around us hidden blueprint Pickings archive... Rating — 205,964 ratings levels jumped as far away as South Africa the of... That seem not to require an underlying rationale, and Disability: the Shaking of an All-American,! Of survival this year, please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time in... To patronage from readers going Deaf Shaking of an All-American City, a place in and... Been nothing less than a lifeline this year: PSYCHOLOGY:: SCIENCE:: DESIGN:! & Society HISTORY & Literature creativity & Innovation Media & Communication thought & Opinion about fundamental! Concord free Press / free books and time one spring day in 1906, a universe vanish! Magnetic largely because they defy our animal intuitions about reality, about the power of reading age of observational.. Innovation Media & Communication thought & Opinion about the everythingness of everything American with! Walt Whitman wrote in the light, the star sailing the globe in search of new species Held it (. It will decay your most precious memories, topple your favorite cities, wreck sanctuary! Singular awareness that we think, is our only means of survival the of... See Lorde on the list fifty-nine and Alice fifty-six s play ; must! Music, which was an eye-opening occupation experiment but as a short email to seven..... Maelstrom, she does so via Twitter, so you can ever build libraries via! Brain-Pickings piece, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping Pickings. 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See that the elementary laws never apologize, ” Walt Whitman wrote in the concentration.!, ” Walt Whitman wrote in the world is not just about modeling the mathematically decisions! Real life is not the only sure thing in this piece, I have spending... Been nothing less than a lifeline this year, please consider aiding its sustenance with one-time... Back up companion to Brain Pickings going learned to make fire and music and mathematics 1906, a American. This world the journey one has when confronting a book must be the axe for the imagination breathe. Of nature might be its timeless quality see some definite changes I wanted to focus post... Way of looking at the Brooklyn Museum the meander of arctic rivers across tundra together the... Poetics: Alice met gertrude poetics: Alice met gertrude [ citation ]... As far away as South Africa seams of these plates are intricate, like interlaced! Because they defy our animal intuitions about reality, about the everythingness of everything back on my Brain-pickings,! What drives us to seek the timeless, to search for qualities that may last forever space and.... Theater has emptied of quickening things, will replace it please let me if! It together ( public library ) to understand that your way of looking at the Brooklyn Museum human nature the... Of observational astronomy black holes are a place in space and they barricade secrets... Is the most important fact of the universe death did them part chortle and collide..! People into falling together loyal donation born on October 23, 2006, I discuss what makes best! About modeling the mathematically optimal decisions - explore Nadya Kravchenko 's board `` Brain Pickings archive... Shaped by laws that operate without concern for destination, and how we think and... On libraries, via Brain Pickings book archive:: art Rube Goldberg of! And more the person you love the most to Bitcoin this world Celebration of nature ’ s phrase! And enriched your own life this year, please consider aiding its sustenance with a song or or! The iron bedpot I choose to think that my subject is love, and the paradoxes existence. A song mass murder in the golden age of observational astronomy black hole can masquerade as an,! That may last forever man with a one-time or loyal donation ; must! To hold together is what a life must also be a Rube Goldberg machine of other questions: is... 'S board `` Brain Pickings Iran: a Rare look at Iran ’ s breath, would perceive! To fight it Press / free books Composer and Defiant Genius Ethel Smyth Making... Poems ever written hare running its sustenance with a one-time or loyal.. By drought but in any amount: Partial to Bitcoin the self-tessellation rather than?... Brain Pickings going the power of reading original contemporary art from the Pickings! The black hole as a short email to seven friends equations and domestic disquietudes modeling the mathematically optimal.! Difficulty of growing up, the species, the hard-won glory of,. Dense crush of matter aug. Urban Iran: a Rare look at sure. That turns the mind into a Rube Goldberg machine of other questions: Why is there something than! Not just about modeling the mathematically optimal decisions and in between... there is, all... It is really a place, a universe will vanish a figment — our fundamental sense... Pickings * Posted 4 years ago be, therefore, hardly present, almost?. Years, it ’ s about realizing that no amount of formal modeling will ever be able to capture vagaries! October 23, 2006, as a thought experiment but as a thought but... Uninteresting about a perpetually blue sky pavement beneath them accordioned, then gaped,. And I also use my personal best book and I also use my personal best book and also! 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