maria popova
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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. Sunday 4/16: Tongo Eisen-Martin, Mahogany Browne, and Jive Poetic read…
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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 of form, the sustentation of empathy (the first step of…
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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 Welty’s writings on the topic. Popova writes: “[I]t might be…
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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 the mind we must ignore its gloomy virtues and celebrate…
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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 by doing so I take away the pain, a great…
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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 Pickings shares with us a beautiful little vignette from Willa…
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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 Howard, a 19th century English meteorologist whose work was admired…
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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 of “emotional tyranny.” Over at Brain Pickings, Maria Popova finds…
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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 twenty-something writer plagued by the same fear that she was…
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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 Popova over at Brain Pickings looks at Truitt’s work and…
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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” Maria Popova of Brainpickings pertinently asks in her March 2014 review…