Zadie Smith wrote in her spectacular essay on optimism and despair.
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Tag: maria popova
How to Make Difficult Decisions: Benjamin Franklin’s Pioneering Pros and Cons Framework
When the 29-year-old Charles Darwin made his endearing list of the pros and cons of marriage, he was applying a now common decision-making technique pioneered half a century earlier by another revolutionary mind on the other side of the Atlantic: America’s polymathic Founding Father Benjamin Frank
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Cosmic Consolation for Human Hardship: The Great Naturalist John Burroughs on How to Live with Life
In those seasons of being when life boughs you down low with world-weariness, when the sun of your soul is collapsing into a black hole, when you despair of humanity’s twin capacity for inhumanity and are no longer able to hold without heartache Maya Angelou’s eternal observation that we are cre
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Our Need for Each Other and Our Need for Our Selves: Muriel Rukeyser on the Root of Strength in Times of Crisis
“My one reader, you reading this book, who are you?” Muriel Rukeyser (December 15, 1913–February 12, 1980) asks with the large forthright eyes of her words in one of the most beautiful and penetrating books ever written on any subject.
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The Fragile Species: A Forgotten Masterpiece of Perspective on How to Live with Ourselves and Each Other
When Earth first erupted with color, flowers took over so suddenly and completely that, two hundred million years later, the baffled Darwin called this blooming conquest an “abominable mystery.
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How to Fix a World: A Four-Year-Old’s Prayerful Poem, Animated by a Ukrainian Artist
“What is essential in the future is that every member of the family, even little children, should learn at whatever cost not to give way to wrong or to co-operate in it,” the pioneering X-ray crystallographer and Quaker peace activist Kathleen Lonsdale wrote as she considered the real building b
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Losing Love, Finding Love, and Living with the Fragility of It All
“Fearlessness is what love seeks,” Hannah Arendt wrote in her superb early work on love and loss. “Such fearlessness exists only in the complete calm that can no longer be shaken by events expected of the future… Hence the only valid tense is the present, the Now.
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Figuring Forward in an Uncertain Universe
We make things and seed them into the world, never fully knowing — often never knowing at all — whom they will reach and how they will blossom in other hearts, how their meaning will unfold in contexts we never imagined. (W.S.
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Nina Simone’s Gum and the Shimmering Strangeness of How Art Casts Its Transcendent Spell on Us
“Time is a dictator, as we know it,” Nina Simone (February 21, 1933–April 21, 2003) observed in her soulful 1969 meditation on time. “Where does it go? What does it do? Most of all, is it alive?”
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Singularity: An Animated Ode to Our Primeval Bond with Nature and Each Other (Toshi Reagon Sings Marissa Davis)
This is the fifth of nine installments in the 2021/2022 animated season of The Universe in Verse in collaboration with On Being, celebrating the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry. See the rest here. Whenever I am down, I think of the gladiolus.
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Front Porch Reflections 
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