Vintage Ads for Libraries and Reading. Donating = loving Brain Pickings remains ad-free and takes hundreds of hours a month to research and write, and thousands of dollars to sustain. If you find any joy and value in it, please consider becoming a Member and supporting with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner: (If you don't have a PayPal account, no need to sign up for one – you can just use any credit or debit card.) You can also become a one-time patron with a single donation in any amount: labors of love. The Nature of the Fun: David Foster Wallace on Why Writers Write. By Maria Popova “Fiction becomes a weird way to countenance yourself and to tell the truth instead of being a way to escape yourself or present yourself in a way you figure you will be maximally likable.”
On the heels of the highly anticipated new David Foster Wallace biography comes Both Flesh and Not: Essays (public library) — a collection spanning twenty years of Wallace’s nonfiction writing on subjects as wide-ranging as math, Borges, democracy, the U.S. Open, and the entire spectrum of human experience in between. Among the anthology’s finest is an essay titled “The Nature of the Fun” — a meditation on why writers write, encrusted in Wallace’s signature blend of self-conscious despondency, even more self-conscious optimism, and overwhelming self-awareness. After offering an extended and rather gory metaphor for the writer’s creative output and a Zen parable about unpredictability, he gets to the meat of things: He concludes on a Bradbury-like note: Donating = Loving Share on Tumblr. Can You Smell the Music? The Rushit Raaga Collection. (Photo Credit - Swapnil Sonawane & Sopan Sharma) To be honest, I had a tinge of cynicism as I read the snippet in a local Marathi daily about the launch of this new product.
These are times when brands are built on the crutches of other, already more accomplished brands - when sportsters help sell cars and perfumes carry the names of film stars. Besides, there are few brands as bankable as classical traditions. An inquiry seemed due. The Rushit Raaga Collection of nine attars (perfumed essential oils) was launched in December at the Savai Gandharva Mahotsav in Pune. The collection is an exploration of the possibility that the resonance of a raaga recital can be reflected within the unraveling layers of traditional Indian perfume, attar.
These fascinating objects were designed jointly by a professor of mechanical engineering and a merchant navy officer, who chanced upon each other at the Savai festival in 2012. Dr Mandar Lele and Anand Jog. A Tweet & Sour Look at 2013 | LET'S PUT DA. I think as one grows older and older, the year gets shorter and shorter. Perhaps, the effective duration of a year is the percentage of your life you spent in it. So, a 1-year old experienced a full-fledged 2013, whereas at 45, the year just represented 1/45 of my life.
So it sort of whizzed past in 8 days or so. Yeah, life sucks. But I do feel somewhat superior to Advani and Karunanidhi for whom 2013 must have felt like a day. In some people to rent an instant cash advance lenders discount viagra online approval can buy a solution. In any case, even this short year was packed with entertainment, mostly provided by our esteemed leaders. Politics Narendra Modi to lead the BJP campaign for 2014. 18 months of Mulayam Singh & Akhilesh Yadav, and slowly Mayawati is appearing like a nice cuddly CM who encouraged stone-based fine arts. Rahul Gandhi is right. I think we can make a reality show out of these Rahul vs Modi debates. Of course, DMK will separate from Congress.
Well done AAP. Sports. Tech-Tonic Shift? Hey, I got an easy topic — Digital in 2014. Easy, because anyone can predict anything on digital, and everything will be wrong anyway. (The only man who usually got it right is sitting in heaven boring the hell out of God by telling him why the iPad Mini should not have been launched). And if by some chance, a prediction does turn out to be right, then I can immediately add ‘Technology Futurist’ to my LinkedIn profile. So, what’s there to lose. In 2014, an incredible amount of useless data will be collected. This ‘information’ will then be crunched by buzzword-based crowdfunded companies that offer real-time marketing using big data on the cloud on a freemium basis. While all this is going on, we’ll be very busy watching stuff all the time. The newspaper, in the meanwhile, will become a useful archive of all the stuff you read the previous day.
People will make more and more friends on Facebook with the express purpose of increasing the audience for all the photos they share. What Is the Higgs? - Interactive Graphic. 30 Things to Start Doing for Yourself. People simply empty out. 15 years later, Bukowski wrote the following letter to Martin and spoke of his joy at having escaped full time employment. (Source: Reach for the Sun Vol. 3; Image: Charles Bukowski, via.) 8-12-86Hello John:Thanks for the good letter. I don't think it hurts, sometimes, to remember where you came from. You know the places where I came from. YOU MIGHT FIND YOURSELF. By Haruki Murakami One beautiful April morning, on a narrow side street in Tokyo’s fashionable Harujuku neighborhood, I walked past the 100% perfect girl. Tell you the truth, she’s not that good-looking. She doesn’t stand out in any way. Her clothes are nothing special. The back of her hair is still bent out of shape from sleep.
Maybe you have your own particular favorite type of girl - one with slim ankles, say, or big eyes, or graceful fingers, or you’re drawn for no good reason to girls who take their time with every meal. But no one can insist that his 100% perfect girl correspond to some preconceived type. “Yesterday on the street I passed the 100% girl,” I tell someone.
“Yeah?” “Not really.” “Your favorite type, then?” “I don’t know. “Strange.” “Yeah. “So anyhow,” he says, already bored, “what did you do? “Nah. She’s walking east to west, and I west to east. Wish I could talk to her. Potentiality knocks on the door of my heart. Now the distance between us has narrowed to fifteen yards. Charles Bukowski, Arthur C. Clarke, Annie Dillard, John Cage, and Others on the Meaning of Life. By Maria Popova “We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.” The quest to understand the meaning of life has haunted humanity since the dawn of existence. Modern history alone has given us a plethora of attempted answers, including ones from Steve Jobs, Stanley Kubrick, David Foster Wallace, Anais Nin, Ray Bradbury, and Jackson Pollock’s dad.
In 1988, the editors of LIFE magazine posed this grand question head-on to 300 “wise men and women,” from celebrated authors, actors, and artists to global spiritual leaders to everyday farmers, barbers, and welfare mothers. Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Dillard: We are here to witness the creation and abet it. Ralph Morse Albert Einstein's study shortly after his death, Princeton, New Jersey Legendary science writer Stephen Jay Gould: The human species has inhabited this planet for only 250,000 years or so-roughly.0015 percent of the history of life, the last inch of the cosmic mile. Bill Owens Sicily. Did God Discover the God Particle? By Deepak Chopra, MD, FACP, Rudolph Tanzi, Ph.D. Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy Professor of Neurology, Harvard Medical School, and Menas Kafatos, Ph.D., Fletcher Jones Endowed Professor in Computational Physics, Chapman University The possible discovery of the Higgs boson would not have been splashed across every major media if the tag "God particle" weren't attached to it.
Physicists hate the term, but they love the publicity. There are huge government grants at stake as well as the prestige of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland. After you read the headline, however, there's little doubt that a general reader cannot actually grasp what a Higgs boson is (or a large hadron accelerator, either). If you watch enough PBS programs and listen to a few physicists, some clarity emerges that a non-physicist can understand. This molasses is very elusive. Here we will refer to some technical matters, but stick with us. None of that is in dispute. Into the Cosmos. Sometime during the summer of 1986 I went with my family to see a circus version of Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita in an outdoor theatre in Kreuzberg, West Berlin.
My only memory of the production is of Margarita herself on a trapeze, her laughter vampish and defiant, as she sliced the air above us. By then we were nearing the end of the Cold War though at the time no one knew it, and right there in a courtyard, metres away from the Wall, was this exultant and ephemeral expression of the conquest of space. The conquest of space. The phrase comes up again and again as I sift through dozens of Soviet documents of the period. By 1986 the ardent years of the Space Age were of course over, its most notable vestiges a few space stations orbiting Earth, but the embers still retain a beguiling, and decidedly nostalgic, glow.
And it was Stefan who, twenty years later when I was writing my first novel, accompanied me to Marzahn, deep in East Berlin, to research the area. Image by riotcinema. The Dark Knight Trilogy Explained : TheDarkKnightRises.