Thao & The Get Down Stay Down - We The Common (For Valerie Bolden) Secret Doors, Hidden Doors, Safe Room, Panic Room, Hidden Safe & Bomb Shelters. 15 Things You Obviously Need In Your New Home LOL, DAMN! The Scale of the Universe 2. Why War: Einstein and Freud's prescience, little-known correspondence on violence, peace, and human nature. By Maria Popova “Every man has a right over his own life and war destroys lives that were full of promise.” Despite his enormous contributions to science, Albert Einstein was no reclusive genius, his ever-eager conversations and correspondence engaging such diverse partners as the Indian philosopher Tagore and a young South African girl who wanted to be a scientist. In 1931, the Institute for Intellectual Cooperation invited the renowned physicist to a cross-disciplinary exchange of ideas about politics and peace with a thinker of his choosing.
He selected Sigmund Freud, born on May 6, 1856, whom he had met briefly in 1927 and whose work, despite being skeptical of psychoanalysis, the legendary physicist had come to admire. In a letter dated April 29, 1931, Einstein laments to Freud: I greatly admire your passion to ascertain the truth–a passion that has come to dominate all else in your thinking. This is the problem: Is there any way of delivering mankind from the menace of war? On the Meaning of Life. The Quantum Theory of Consciousness. Guide for Writers: A Writer's Lexicon. A lexicon is a dictionary of specialized terms.
The terms defined in the following lexicon should be known by writers and editors. absurd, theater of the - Absurdist dramas present characters struggling to find order and purpose in irrational incomprehensible situations. accent - In poetry, the vocal force or emphasis placed on a syllable or word. act - One of the primary divisions in a script. Action - The internal or external activity by which a character attempts to achieve his or her goals. adaptation - A work based on another. Adventure story - A type of popular literature that centers on exciting action and danger, heroic derring-do, and happy endings, often to the detriment of solid characterization. aesthetic distance - Standing apart from a work of art as a reader or viewer; recognizing that it is art and not real life. aesthetics - The philosophy of art; the study of the nature of beauty in literature and the arts, and the development of criteria for judging beauty. argument - 1.
E. e. cummings reads "anyone lived in a pretty how town" (Harvard, 1953) By Maria Popova “…and noone stooped to kiss his face…” “Writing, at its best, is a lonely life,” Hemingway observed in his short and stirring 1954 Nobel Prize acceptance speech. “One can never be alone enough to write,” Susan Sontag sighed. “Learn to be alone,” Tarkovsky advised young people.
And yet the art of being alone comes with a dark side, the loneliness of a nonconformist amidst the herd mentality of society — something e. e. cummings captures poignantly in his poem “[anyone lived in a pretty how town],” originally published in the 1940 edition of Poetry Magazine and later included in E. E. Cummings: Complete Poems, 1904-1962 (public library). On May 28, 1953, while lecturing as a visiting professor at Harvard, cummings recorded this mesmerizing reading of the poem — let his voice sweep you away: The recording appears on Essential E.E. Thanks, Tom Donating = Loving Bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings takes hundreds of hours each month. Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. Document: The Symbolism Survey, Sarah Funke Butler. In 1963, a sixteen-year-old San Diego high school student named Bruce McAllister sent a four-question mimeographed survey to 150 well-known authors of literary, commercial, and science fiction. Did they consciously plant symbols in their work?
He asked. Who noticed symbols appearing from their subconscious, and who saw them arrive in their text, unbidden, created in the minds of their readers? When this happened, did the authors mind? McAllister had just published his first story, “The Faces Outside,” in both IF magazine and Simon and Schuster’s 1964 roundup of the best science fiction of the year. His project involved substantial labor—this before the Internet, before e-mail—but was not impossible: many authors and their representatives were listed in the Twentieth-Century American Literature series found in the local library.
The pages here feature a number of the surveys in facsimile: Jack Kerouac, Ayn Rand, Ralph Ellison, Ray Bradbury, John Updike, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer. Truly Grand Home Libraries. Is This The Greatest Cover For "Fahrenheit 451" You've Ever Seen. How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes: Lessons in Mindfulness and Creativity from the Great Detective. By Maria Popova “A man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose.”
“The habit of mind which leads to a search for relationships between facts,” wrote James Webb Young in his famous 1939 5-step technique for creative problem-solving, “becomes of the highest importance in the production of ideas.” But just how does one acquire those vital cognitive customs? That’s precisely what science writer Maria Konnikova explores in Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes (UK; public library) — an effort to reverse-engineer Holmes’s methodology into actionable insights that help develop “habits of thought that will allow you to engage mindfully with yourself and your world as a matter of course.”
The idea of mindfulness itself is by no means a new one. It is most difficult to apply Holmes’s logic in those moments that matter the most. Our intuition is shaped by context, and that context is deeply informed by the world we live in. Are You A Hipster? | Idea Channel | PBS. There's no time for that. Run you fools! 20 Even Stranger and More Wonderful Books. Diary of an acid trip. The most sexed up man in history... If I didn't know about God and sin. Andy understands me on so many levels. And just like that... Follow your ambitions. Despite all his rage, he's still just a widdle puppy in a cage. We declare the world as our canvas24 3D-Street Art Photos - A Collection. Golden Eagle Snatches Kid. Video of Eagle snatching kid is a FAKE!
Photos. The Eagle, by Alfred Tennyson. Bookshelf Porn. Do You Really Want to Live Forever? Imagine you are offered a trustworthy opportunity for immortality in which your mind (perhaps also your body) will persist eternally. Let’s further stipulate that the offer includes perpetual youthful health and the ability to upgrade to any cognitive and physical technologies that become available in the future. There is one more stipulation: You could never decide later to die.
Would you take it? Metaphysician and former British diplomat Stephen Cave thinks accepting such an offer would be a bad idea. Cave’s fascinating new book, Immortality, posits that civilization is a major side effect of humanity's attempts to live forever. Cave identifies four immortality narratives that drive civilizations over time which he calls; (1) Staying Alive, (2) Resurrection, (3) Soul, and (4) Legacy. Why not simply repair the damage caused by aging, thus defeating physical death? Resurrection is his next immortality narrative. The Transformation problem is harder. Counterfeit? The Death Delusion. 10 Science Fiction Novels You Pretend to Have Read (And Why You Should Actually Read Them)
Hipsters and Low-Tech. Hipsters have been much discussed on the Cyborgology blog (see: here, here, here, and here). Cyborgology authors have also talked about the fetishization of low-tech/analog media and devices (see: here and here). As David Paul Strohecker pointed out, these two issue interrelated: “hipsters are at the forefront of movements of nostalgic revivalism.” I want to pick up these threads and add a small observation. Nathan Jurgenson and I were discussing why low-tech devices have a seductive quality. Consider the popularity of, for example, fixed-gear bicycles or vintage cameras (such as the Kodak Brownie or the Polaroid PX-70 [correction: SX-70]). Žižek is often cited as the philosopher of the hipster or the hipster philosopher, but, here, I argue that Simmel and Deleuze were the true Oracles of Hipsterdom. Simmel observed that the individual was a Modern phenomenon–that the desire to “be different” is historically contingent.
How does this relate to technology then? WHICH IS THE BEST LANGUAGE TO LEARN? Our Top 12 in 2012. No. 1: Once a mark of the cultured, language-learning is in retreat among English speakers. It’s never too late, but where to start? Robert Lane Greene launches our latest Big Question ... From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, March/April 2012 For language lovers, the facts are grim: Anglophones simply aren’t learning them any more. In Britain, despite four decades in the European Union, the number of A-levels taken in French and German has fallen by half in the past 20 years, while what was a growing trend of Spanish-learning has stalled. Why learn a foreign language?
Nonetheless, compelling reasons remain for learning other languages. Poetry and lyrics suffer particularly badly in translation. The practical reasons are just as compelling. So which one should you, or your children, learn? Probably not. This factor is the Chinese writing system (which Japan borrowed and adapted centuries ago). To my surprise, all three of them simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. 10 places that don’t exist (but should) We've all read a book or watched a movie and wished the places it transported us to were real.
Some of the most enduring destinations are fictional. Well, not completely. Some were inspired by real places that resonated with their authors. So, here are my top mythical locations. What have I missed? 10. The home of Winnie the Pooh, Christopher Robin, Piglet, Eeyore, Tigger and friends, the lush and charming Hundred Acre Wood is the literary soul mate of Ashdown Forest in Sussex. 9. 8. The mythical city of gold has come to represent things opulent or unattainable. 7. Rumour has it only children can visit Neverland, but if you think happy thoughts you might just find your way to the famous home of Peter Pan, Captain Hook and the Lost Boys. 6. Who wouldn’t like to travel via rabbit hole? 5. Arthurian scholar Norris J. 4. 3. There one minute, gone the next, illusive, mist-shrouded Brigadoon is how many travellers like to imagine Scotland. 2. Surrounded by desert on all sides, Frank L. 1. Books that will induce a mindfuck.
Here is the list of books that will officially induce mindfucks, sorted alphabetically by author. Those authors in bold have been recommended by one or more people as being generally mindfucking - any books listed under their names are particularly odd. You're welcome to /msg me to make an addition to this list. And finally, although he's way down at the bottom, my personal recommendation is definitely Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, as it turns the ultimate mindfuck: inverting the world-view of our entire culture, and it is non-fiction.