Maria Popova's Blog, page 93

The Invention of the Love Song, the First Algorithm, and the Mathematics of Transcendence: Pythagoras, Sappho, and How Music Made the World Modern

How a refugee and a lesbian lifted humanity from the age of superstition to the age of reason and pioneered the subversive art of telling our own stories by our own truth.

“To create today is to create dangerously,” Albert Camus told a gathering of young people at the peak of the Cold War, shortly after becoming the second-youngest laureate of the Nobel Prize. “The question, for all those who cannot live without art and what it signifies, is merely to find out how, among the police forces of s...

How Reading Is Like Love: Italo Calvino on the Ecstasy of Surrendering to Other Dimensions of Experience

“Lovers’ reading of each other’s bodies… differs from the reading of written pages in that it is not linear… What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space.”

“I function only by falling in love: with French and France; with the 15th Century; with microbiology, cosmology, sleep research,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her daybook, capturing the necessary passion that makes writing akin to falling...

Art and the Human Spirit: Olivia Laing on What the Lives of Great Artists Reveal About Vulnerability, Love, Loneliness, Resistance, and Our Search for Meaning

“We’re so often told that art can’t really change anything. But… it shapes our ethical landscapes; it opens us to the interior lives of others. It is a training ground for possibility. It makes plain inequalities, and it offers other ways of living.”

The composite creation of a doctor, a philosopher, a poet, and a sculptor, the word empathy in the modern sense only came into use at the dawn of the twentieth century as a term for the imaginative act of projecting yourself into a work of art, int...

The Pattern Inside the Pattern: Fractals, the Hidden Order Beneath Chaos, and the Story of the Refugee Who Revolutionized the Mathematics of Reality

“In the mind’s eye, a fractal is a way of seeing infinity.”

I have learned that the lines we draw to contain the infinite end up excluding more than they enfold.

I have learned that most things in life are better and more beautiful not linear but fractal. Love especially.

In a testament to Aldous Huxley’s astute insight that “all great truths are obvious truths but not all obvious truths are great truths,” the polymathic mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot (November 20, 1924–October 14, 2010) obse...

We Are Water Protectors: An Illustrated Celebration of Nature, Native Heritage, and the Courage to Stand Up for Earth

An inspired signal from that sacred place where the spirit of wakeful action meets the bone of ancient wisdom.

“Every story is a story of water,” Native American poet Natalie Diaz wrote in her stunning ode to her heritage, the language of the Earth, and the erasures of history.

We ourselves are a story of water — biologically and culturally, in our most elemental materiality and our mightiest metaphors.

From author Carole Lindstrom, member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibwe, and artist Mic...

A Scientist’s Advice on Healing: A Soulful Animated Poem About Getting to the Other Side of Heartbreak

“Try to accept this fat red hurt is your starting point.”

“Love your heart. For this is the prize,” Toni Morrison wrote in an exquisite passage from Beloved as she considered the body as an instrument of sanity, joy, and self-respect a century after William James asserted in his groundbreaking work on how our bodies affect our feelings that “a purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity,” lending the fledgling credibility of a young science to Walt Whitman’s poetic insistence that “the body...

Road to Survival: Empowering Wisdom the Forgotten Book That Shaped the Modern Environmental Movement

“If we ourselves do not govern our destiny, firmly and courageous, no one is going to do it for us.”

A century after the trailblazing conservationist John Muir observed that “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,” and half a century before Maya Angelou urged us in her cosmic clarion call to see that “we, this people, on this minuscule and kithless globe” must correct our course before we destroy ourselves and our kith-hitched globe, t...

Stunning Celestial Art from the 1750 Astronomy Book That First Described the Spiral Shape of the Milky Way and Dared Imagine the Existence of Other Galaxies

The story of a forgotten visionary suspended between science and spiritual yearning, who inspired Kant and anticipated Hubble.

Thomas Wright (September 22, 1711–February 25, 1786) grew up with a passion for learning and a speech impediment that made the rural English schoolroom a gauntlet. When he set about educating himself at home, his father declared the boy mad for his mathematical passions and burned all the books his mother had bought him. Undeterred, Thomas found a mathematics tutor in a...

Snails Run for Love: A Sensual Interlude from the Symphony of Evolution

A rare and rapturous glimpse of the slow double embrace by which some of Earth’s tenderest creatures make more of themselves.

In February 2018, I found myself on a friend’s fruit farm in Kauai, having gratefully escaped the short bleak days of Brooklyn winter to finish Figuring. Each day, being a creature of loops and routines, I did my daily sprints along the exact same stretch of gravel by a blooming grapefruit tree on the edge of the farm.

One morning, just before Valentine’s Day, I halted...

Love, Loss, and the Banality of Survival: Charles Darwin, His Beloved Daughter, and How We Find Meaning in Mortality

A bittersweet signal from the discomposing territory between reason and hope.

This essay is excerpted from the thirteenth chapter of Figuring, titled “The Banality of Survival.”

In the spring of 1849, ten years before On the Origin of Species shook the foundation of humanity’s understanding of life, the polymathic astronomer John Herschel — coiner of the word photography, son of Uranus discoverer William Herschel and nephew of Caroline Herschel, the world’s first professional female astronomer ...