Tag Brain Pickings
Hannah Arendt From its first publication in 1951 The Origins of Totalitarianism has been considered a masterpiece of scholarship and historical research, a devastating insight into humanity’s potential for terror. To labour the obvious, it has an uncanny and yes,… Continue Reading →
Maria Popova: The Marginalian. We at A Sense of Place Magazine are unabashed fans of New York based Bulgarian born polymath Maria Popova, whose transformative blog Brain Pickings entrances and challenges readers worldwide. Her first book, Figuring, is a fascinating… Continue Reading →
Maria Popova: From the Stoics to the snails, by way of music, matter, and the mind. A Sense of Place Magazine is an unabashed fan of Maria Popova’s celebrated blog Brain Pickings, now renamed as The Marginalian, easily one of… Continue Reading →
Maria Popova: Marginalian. A Sense of Place Magazine is an unabashed fan of Maria Popova’s celebrated blog Brain Pickings, easily one of the best and most accessible literary journals in the world. The blog has been recently renamed The Marginalian…. Continue Reading →
By Maria Popova: Brain Pickings. Maria Popova is a Bulgarian born New York based polymath who has read everything so the rest of us don’t have to. Not just hyper intelligent, she has an uncanny eye for beauty combined with… Continue Reading →
By Maria Popova: Brain Pickings. Maria Popova is a Bulgarian born New York based polymath who has read everything so the rest of us don’t have to. Not just hyper intelligent, she has an uncanny eye for beauty combined with… Continue Reading →
A Sense of Place Magazine is an unabashed fan of Maria Popova’s celebrated blog Brain Pickings, easily one of the best literary journals in the world. Maria Popova is a Bulgarian born New York based polymath who has read everything… Continue Reading →
With Maria Popova A Sense of Place Magazine is an unabashed fan of Maria Popova’s celebrated literary blog Brain Pickings, easily one of the best literary blogs in the world. Maria Popova is a Bulgarian born New York based polymath… Continue Reading →
By Maria Popova Brain Pickings was born on October 23, 2006, as a short email to seven friends. Seven years and several incomprehensible million readers into its existence, I began what has since become an annual tradition — a distillation of the… Continue Reading →
Alan Lightman’s The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew is a book about nesting ospreys, multiple universes, atheism, spiritualism, and the arrow of time. He takes the reader back and forth between ordinary occurrences-old shoes and entropy, sailing far out at sea and the infinite expanse of space. He looks toward the universe and captures aspects of it in a series of beautifully written essays, each offering a glimpse at the whole from a different perspective: here time, there symmetry, not least God. It is a meditation by a remarkable humanist-physicist, a book worth reading by anyone entranced by big ideas grounded in the physical world.
Attention without feeling is only a report: “Life exists only because of a myriad of synchronicities that bring us to this particular place at this particular moment. In return for such a gift, the only sane response is to glitter in reply. Knowing the fractal geometry of an individual snowflake makes the winter landscape even more of a marvel. Knowing the mosses enriches our knowing of the world. Mosses and other small beings issue an invitation to dwell for a time right at the limits of ordinary perception. All it requires of us is attentiveness. Look in a certain way and a whole new world can be revealed. Learning to see mosses is more like listening than looking. A cursory glance will not do it. Starting to hear a faraway voice or catch a nuance in the quiet subtext of a conversation requires attentiveness, a filtering of all the noise, to catch the music. Mosses are not elevator music; they are the intertwined threads of a Beethoven quartet.” So writes one of the world’s leading botanists, Robin Wall Kimmerer, in her masterwork Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses — an extraordinary celebration of smallness and the grandeur of life, as humble yet surprisingly magical as its subject.
Questions like why our world exists and what nothing is have occupied minds great and ordinary since the dawn of humanity, and yet for all our scientific progress, they continue to do so, yielding only hypotheses rather than concrete answers. But there is something immutably heartening in the difference between the primitive hypotheses of myth, folklore and religion, which handed off such mysteries to various deities and the occasional white-bearded man, and the increasingly educated guesses of modern science. In the title essay of his excellent The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew which also gives us beautiful meditations on science and spirituality, Alan Lightman points to fine-tuning — the notion that the basic forces propelling our universe appear to be fine-tuned in such a way as to make the existence of life possible — as a centerpiece of how modern scientists have attempted to answer these age-old questions.