Maria Popova's Blog, page 108

Amanda Palmer Reads “Einstein’s Mother” by Tracy K. Smith

Was he mute a while, or all tears. Did he raise his hands to his ears so he could scream scream scream.

The forces of chance that chisel reality out of the bedrock of possibility this improbable planet, this improbable life leave ghostly trails of what-ifs, questions asked and unanswered, unanswerable. Why do you, this particular you, exist? Why does the universe? And once the dice have fallen in favor of existence, there are so many possible points of entry into life, so many possible...

Spring in a Pandemic: Mary Shelley on What Makes Life Worth Living and Nature’s Beauty as a Lifeline to Regaining Sanity

There is but one solution to the intricate riddle of life; to improve ourselves, and contribute to the happiness of others.

Half a century before Walt Whitman considered what makes life worth living when a paralytic stroke boughed him to the ground of being, Mary Shelley (August 30, 1797February 1, 1851) placed that question at the beating heart of The Last Man (free ebook | public library) the 1826 novel she wrote in the bleakest period of her life: after the deaths of three of her...

The Universe in Verse 2019: Full Show

Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes.

Each spring, I join forces with my friends at Pioneer Works for an improbable idea that began in 2017 and has taken on a life of its own: The Universe in Verse a charitable celebration of the science and splendor of nature through poetry.

The third annual Universe in Verse at Pioneer Works. April 23, 2019. Photograph: Walter Wlodarczyk.

With our sleeves rolled up and sweat-soaked in preparation for the 2020 virtual edition (...

Philip, the Last Sweet Potato: A Non-Binary Quarantine Love Story from Beloved Children’s Book Author and Illustrator Sophie Blackall

Odd and lovely consolation for despair and aloneness springing from that place of defiance and melancholy and ecstasy.

When the world came unworlded with a pandemic, beloved childrens book author and illustrator Sophie Blackall packed up her Brooklyn home, gathered her husband, her step-daughter, and her step-daughters girlfriend, and headed for Milkwood Farm a centuries-old dairy farm she has been laboring to transform into a rural retreat for artists and writers. There, mastering the art...

The Value of Being Uncomfortable: Herman Melville on Privation as a Portal to Appreciation and Aliveness

To enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself.

Anyone with any degree of mental toughness ought to be able to exist without the things they like most for a few months at least, Georgia OKeeffe, impoverished and solitary in the desert, wrote in considering limitation, creativity, and setting priorities as she was about to revolutionize art while the world was crumbling into...

Antidotes to Fear of Death: Astrophysicist Janna Levin Reads Astronomer and Poet Rebecca Elson’s Stunning Cosmic Salve for Our Creaturely Tremblings of Heart

We are all navigating an external world but only through the prism of our own minds, our own subjective experience The majesty of the universe is only ever conjured up in the mind.

It is our biological wiring to exist and then not; it is our psychological wiring to spend our lives running from this elemental fact on the hamster wheel of busyness and the hedonic treadmill of achievement, running from the disquieting knowledge that the atoms huddling for a cosmic blink around the shadow of a...

Anne Lamott’s Wondrous Letter to Children About Books as Antidotes to Isolation, Portals to Perspective, and Crucibles of Self-Discovery

Books and stories are medicine, plaster casts for broken lives and hearts, slings for weakened spirits.

Books awaken us into living from the slumber of near-life. Books are lifelines of survival in inhumane times, building blocks of conscientious citizenship, reliquaries of the human spirit. What we read shapes not only what we become, but how we become.

That is what the wise and wonderful Anne Lamott explores in her lovely contribution to A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader (...

Bicycling for Ladies: An Illustrated 1896 Manifesto for the Universal Splendors of the Bicycle as an Instrument of Self-Reliance, a Training Machine for Living with Uncertainty, and a Portal to Joy

You are at all times independent. This absolute freedom of the cyclist can be known only to the initiated.

After the first progenitor of the modern bicycle a seat atop two in-line metal wheels without gears, chain, tires, or pedals even, to be straddled and propelled Flintstones-style with strides pushing off the ground, dubbed the running machine made its debut in the early nineteenth century, novelty-enthusiastic riders struggling to balance the contraption began migrating from the...

Bicycling for Ladies: An 1896 Manifesto for the Universal Splendors of the Bicycle as an Instrument of Self-Reliance, a Training Machine for Living with Uncertainty, and a Portal to Joy

Cheerfulness is an invariable factor for it is unusual, on a bicycle trip, that everything happens as it is expected or has been planned for.

After the first progenitor of the modern bicycle a seat atop two in-line metal wheels without gears, chain, tires, or pedals even, to be straddled and propelled Flintstones-style with strides pushing off the ground, dubbed the running machine made its debut in the early nineteenth century, novelty-enthusiastic riders struggling to balance the...

Standing on the Shoulders of Solitude: Newton, the Plague, and How Quarantine Fomented the Greatest Leap in Science

Truth is the offspring of silence and meditation.

In the 1650s, the penumbra of plague slowly began eclipsing Europe. Italy fell first, soon Spain, then Germany, then Holland. From across the slender cell wall of the Channel, England watched and trembled, then cautiously relaxed for about a decade, some divine will seemed to be shielding the country. But the world was already worshipping at the altar of commerce and the forces of globalization had already been set into motion with Englands...