Reads by Maria Popova
Humanity’s First Cosmic Gallery of Children’s Art: What the Youngest Members of Our Young Species Most Cherish About Life on Earth
An illustrated love letter to our Pale Blue Dot by humanity’s most innocent scale models of the universe.
Barry Lopez on Storytelling and His Advice on the Three Steps to Becoming a Writer
“It is through story that we embrace the great breadth of memory, that we can distinguish what is true, and that we may glimpse, at least occasionally, how to live without despair in the midst of the horror that dogs and unhinges us.”
June 16, 1816: The Inception of Frankenstein and Mary Shelley’s Prescient Warning About Reproductive Rights
A teenage girl from another epoch illuminates the fault lines of ours.
Bronson Alcott on the Meaning of Family and How Our Friendships Humanize Us: His Ecstatic Diary Entry Upon His Daughter Louisa May’s Birth
“The human being isolates itself from the supplies of Providence for the happiness and renovation of life, unless those ties which connect it with others are formed.”
The Dandelion and the Meaning of Life: G.K. Chesterton on How to Dig for the “Submerged Sunrise of Wonder”
Recovering the “forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence” alive in the back of our modernity-deadened minds.
The Only Valiant Way to Complain Is to Create: William Blake and the Stubborn Courage of the Unexampled
“The Eye altering alters all.”
The Human Kaleidoscope and the Unwritten Story of the World: “Radiolab” Creator Jad Abumrad’s Superb Caltech Commencement Address
A ten-year-old boy on the side of a Lebanese mountain road, three generations of monarch butterflies, and the history of the future.
Twenty Reasons for Being
A pastiche poem of tribute to the past and resolve for the possible.
The Beginning and the End: Robinson Jeffers’s Epic Poem About the Interwoven Mystery of Mind and Universe
“Pleasure and pain, wonder, love, adoration, hatred and terror: how do these thing grow from a chemical reaction?”
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