Maria Popova's Blog, page 121

Nellie Bly Makes the News: An Animated Documentary About the Investigative Journalism Pioneer Who Paved the Way for Women in Media

“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 Bly (May 5, 1864–January 27, 1922) composed and published a searing letter of response to a man who, as the father of five girls, cynically questioned what girls are good for. At twenty-two, she risked her life in a groundbreaking exposé of abuses at insane asylums, which led to some of the...

Trees at Night: Stunning Rorschach Silhouettes from the 1920s

“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?”

Walt Whitman considered trees the wisest of teachers. Hermann Hesse found in them sweet consolation for our mortality. Wangari Maathai turned to them as a form of resistance and empowerment that earned her the Nobel Peace Prize. “The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of other...

Borders and Belonging: Toni Morrison’s Prescient Wisdom on the Refugee Struggle, the Violence of Otherness, and the Meaning of Home

“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 our belonging in a world of violent alienation and alienating violence? I use “alien” here both in the proper etymological sense rooted in the Latin alienus, “belonging to another,” and in the astrophysical sense of “from another planet,” “not human,” for the combined effect of a dehumanizing...

Faster Than Light: Marilyn Nelson Reads Her Exquisite Poem About the Purpose of Life and How Our Impermanence Both Frustrates and Fuels Our Creative Drive

“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 her spare, lovely poem celebrating the genius of Einstein’s theory of relativity — genius at the heart of which was his bold and, at the time, countercultural decision to fix the speed of light as an immutable constant around which all the other variables converged to construct his groundbreakin...

The Antidote to Prejudice: Walter Lippmann on Overriding the Mind’s Propensity for Preconceptions

“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 with uncommon lucidity what it takes to apprehend reality unblinded by our preconceptions. Every once in a rare and rapturous while, the curtain of our preconceptions lifts and we are able to see, as Virginia Woolf did, “behind the cotton wool of daily life” and experience “a revelat...

Trailblazing 19th-Century Astronomer Maria Mitchell on Social Change and the Life of the Mind

“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 body.”

“Everybody should have something to point to,” a mill laborer told Studs Terkel in a beautiful conversation about the dignity of labor. For the vast majority of human history, the vast majority of human labor has been exerted in the direction of alleviating hunger as the basis for the s...

Relationship Happiness and Your DNA: How One Gene Encodes Emotional Sensitivity

Inside 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 ‘love’ — is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other,” Adrienne Rich wrote in her stunning meditation on relationships. A happy human relationship, it turns out, is contingent not upon the nature and deli...

Meditations on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp: Polish Painter Józef Czapski on Literature, Survival, and the Human Soul

“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, is a trial every creative being must endure.”

“The end of a book’s wisdom appears to us as merely the start of our own,” Marcel Proust wrote as he considered why we read. “There is some Proust in me, and through Proust, bit by bit, I become aware of my own possibilities,” the great Polish p...

What If: An Illustrated Celebration of the Utopian Imagination and the Will to Change the World

To 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 always begin with “what if” — the mightiest spring for the utopian imagination, the fulcrum by which every revolution rolls into being. What if this world were freer, more beautiful, more just? “We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not im...

The Lioness in the Tall Grass: Farmer and Poet Laura Brown-Lavoie’s Extraordinary Letter to Children About the Power of Storytelling

In 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 running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels: literature was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was no wolf behind him… Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that p...