How to Survive Hopelessness

Dougal Robertson (January 29, 1924–September 22, 1991) was still a teenager, the youngest of a Scottish music teacher’s eight children, when he joined the British Merchant Navy.

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Einstein on Free Will and the Power of the Imagination

We are accidents of biochemistry and chance, moving through the world waging wars and writing poems, spellbound by the seductive illusion of the self, every single one of our atoms traceable to some dead star.

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Psychedelics Open Your Brain. You Might Not Like What Falls In.

Reshaping your mind isn’t always a great idea. If you’ve ever been to London, you know that navigating its wobbly grid, riddled with curves and dead-end streets, requires impressive spatial memory.

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The Vital Difference Between Work and Labor: Lewis Hyde on Sustaining the Creative Spirit

It is a gladness to be able to call one’s daily work a labor of love, and to have that labor put food on the table the way any work does, dishwashing or dentistry.

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Nick Cave on the Antidote to Our Existential Helplessness

We live between the scale of gluons and the scale of galaxies, incapable of touching either, irrelevant to the fate of both.

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Music and the Price of What We Cherish: Margaret Atwood on the Bonds and Obligations of Creative Gifts

A decade ago, several years after I started writing The Marginalian (under the outgrown name Brain Pickings, in my twenties, while working four jobs), a musician friend gave me a book she said captured the animating spirit of my labor of love: The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World (

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Herbie Hancock’s Antidote to Burnout

We are makers of our own myths, but the more we live into them, the more we risk becoming their captives.

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David Bowie on Creativity and His Advice to Artists

Every creator’s creations are their coping mechanism for life — for the loneliness of being, for the longing for connection, for the dazzling incomprehension of what it all means.

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The Log from the Sea of Cortez: John Steinbeck’s Forgotten Masterpiece on How to Think and the Art of Seeing the Pattern Beyond the Particular

The hardest state for a human being to sustain is that of open-endedness.

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The Joy of Suffering Overcome : Young Beethoven’s Stirring Letter to His Brothers About the Loneliness of Living with Deafness and How Music Saved His Life

Aldous Huxley wrote of Beethoven’s Benedictus in his exquisite meditation on why music enchants us so. But he could have well been writing about Ludwig van Beethoven (December 16, 1770–March 26, 1827) himself — a creator suffused with darkness yet animated by the benediction of light.

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