Things to Look Forward to – artist and writer Sophie Blackall’s illustrated celebration of living with presence in uncertain times, disguised as a love letter to the future. Dive in – the most life-famished part of you will thank you.
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Every man or woman who is sane, every man or woman who has the feeling of being a person in the world, and for whom the world means something, every happy person, is in infinite debt to a woman.
On Mother’s Day, how the pioneering psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott revolutionized culture with his countercultural notion of the “good-enough mother” in the 1950s.
Emily Dickinson’s botanical inspiration – the stunning 19th-century flower paintings of the forgotten artist and poet Clarissa Munger Badger.
Yo-Yo Ma performs Nobel-winning physicist Richard Feynman’s ode to the wonder of life, animated by artist Kelli Anderson – the culmination of the nine-part animated Universe in Verse series, celebrating science and the wonder of reality through poetic beauty.
Text and details here.
“If you want your children to be intelligent,” Einstein is said to have said, “read them fairy tales. If you want them to be very intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”
Arthur Rackham illustrates classic Irish fairy tales.
The Tolkien estate has released several of his little-known paintings from the year he published (with his own original illustrations) the first edition of The Hobbit, adding to his previously revealed art. Also see Mr. Bliss – the little-known children’s book he wrote and illustrated for his own sons – and this rare recording of him singing “Sam’s Rhyme of the Troll” from his first encounter with a tape recorder.
Everything depends on the individual human being, regardless of how small a number of like-minded people there is… on each person… creatively making the meaning of life a reality in his or her own being.
11 months after his release from the concentration camps, Viktor Frankl gave a set of lectures (lost for decades) on moving beyond optimism and pessimism to find life’s deepest source of meaning.
Achieving Perspective (featuring David Byrne and some history of science)
Vulnerability at its heart is the willingness to show up and be seen when you can’t control perception.
Brené Brown (and other immensely insightful thinkers) on the paradox of vulnerability and the relationship between aloneness and belonging, in love and work.
On Edward Gorey’s birthday, his tender and surprising vintage illustrated allegory about the secret of true love.
Look into a flower, and what do you see? Into the very heart of nature’s double nature — that is, the contending energies of creation and dissolution, the spiring toward complex form and the tidal pull away from it… the achievement of order against all odds and its blithe abandonment… the perfection of art and the blind flux of nature… Could that be it — right there, in a flower — the meaning of life?
Flowers and the meaning of life, from Emily Dickinson to The Little Prince to Michael Pollan.
The little-known story of Sarah Mapps Douglass and her consummate botanical paintings – the first surviving art signed by an African-American woman.
These are the times in life — when nothing happens — but in quietness the soul expands.
Artist and philosopher Rockwell Kent’s century-old meditations on wilderness, solitude, and creativity, penned during a seven-month adventure in Alaska with his young son – immensely insightful, almost unbearably beautiful.
Black History Month the science way, with a poem: My God, It’s Full of Stars.