Posts by tag
maria popova
25 posts
Notable NYC: 4/15–4/31
Saturday 4/15: Protest in support of releasing Donald Trump’s tax returns. Bryant Park, 1 p.m., free. Thom Donovan and Marissa Perel join the Segue Series. Zinc Bar, 4:30 p.m., $5.…
How Books Saved Mary Oliver’s Life
Feeling anxious about today’s election? Brain Pickings gives us a look at how writer Mary Oliver copes when times are tough: The second world—the world of literature—offered me, besides the pleasures…
The Lyrics of Friendship
What is friendship if not learning the song of another’s heart and singing it back to them? In a reflection on friendship and language, Brain Pickings’s Maria Popova explores Eudora…
Saving Our Minds
At Brain Pickings, Maria Popova reviews Albert Camus’s Lyrical and Critical Essays, and suggests works by Nietzsche and Susan Sontag to read alongside Camus’s eye- and mind-opening work: If we are to save…
Perhaps the Greatest Pleasure
It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because…
Willa Cather on Happiness
I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. Brain…
Reading for a Cloudy Day
At Brain Pickings, Maria Popova muses on Richard Hamblyn’s The Invention of Clouds: How an Amateur Meteorologist Forged the Language of the Skies, which details the true story of Luke…
Kafka’s Father
Franz Kafka’s letters reveal how the author’s father impacted his writing and his life, and a relationship fraught with fear. Kafka worried about his father’s “intellectual domination” creating an environment…
Anatomy of a Motherfucker
Maria Popova collects the advice of Cheryl Strayed and uses Strayed’s words to deconstruct motherfuckery. Invoking the time right before she wrote her first book, when she too was a…
Making Art and Being an Artist
When does an artist get to be called an artist? Anne Truitt explored the labels in her diary seven years in the making, Daybook: The Journal of an Artist. Maria…
Word of the Day: Kakorrhaphiophobia
(n.) an abnormal fear of failure or defeat; from the Greek kakos (“bad, evil”); syn. atychiphobia Everybody in L.A. fails. We just do. —Moby, from “Creativity and Freedom to Fail”…