David Foster Wallace on Ambition, Animated

“If your fidelity to perfectionism is too high, you never do anything.”

On March 4, 1996, WNYC’s Leonard Lopate sat down with David Foster Wallace — cultural critic, articulator of the ineffable, tragic prophet of the meaning of life — to talk about Infinite Jest, the 1,079-page, three-pound-three-ounce novel that catapulted Wallace into literary fame. Now, the wonderful folks of Blank on Blank and animator Patrick Smith have teamed up with PBS Digital Studios to bring Wallace’s wisdom on ambition, education, and writing to life. Highlights below:

Like Neil Gaiman, who famously admonished, “Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving,” Wallace cautions against the lose-lose mindset of perfectionism:

You know, the whole thing about perfectionism. The perfectionism is very dangerous, because of course if your fidelity to perfectionism is too high, you never do anything. Because doing anything results in– It’s actually kind of tragic because it means you sacrifice how gorgeous and perfect it is in your head for what it really is.

Like Sister Corita Kent, Wallace sees learning and teaching as intertwined:

I was a very difficult person to teach when I was a student and I thought I was smarter than my teachers and they told me a lot of things that I thought were retrograde or outdated or B.S. And I’ve learned more teaching in the last three years than I ever learned as a student.

Pair with Wallace on true heroism and why writers write.

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How the Universe Was Born, Animated: A CERN Explanation

From cosmology to particle physics, or how the Big Bang made its way into the lab.

The question of why the world exists has not only puzzled some of history’s greatest minds but has also, at one point or another, occurred to just about every human being. And yet the more we learn, the more we understand how little we actually know: The Big Bang, for instance, turns out to have been silent, and the very notions of “something” and “nothing” require a scientific quest all their own.

But in this short animated primer from my friends at TED Ed and TEDxCERN, CERN scientist Tom Whyntie explains what we do know about how the universe was born:

Veer from the scientific into the philosophical with John Updike on the universe and why there is something rather than nothing.

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The True Science of Parallel Universes, Animated

Choose-your-own-adventure realities, black holes, and other cosmic escapism.

Some of the greatest minds in science and the humanities have wondered — and attempted to answer — why the universe exists. That is, our universe, the universe, in the singular. But while it might be alluring to imagine what it would be like to live in a universe of ten dimensions, reality is at once simpler and more complex. From the wonderful MinutePhysics — who have previously explored whether the universe has a purpose, why the color pink doesn’t exist, how science education is stuck in the 19th century, why the past is different from the future, and why it’s dark at night — comes a lesson in science and semantics that distills the various hypotheses of parallel universes:

We must remember that physics is science, not philosophy, and in our attempts to explain the universe that we observe, we have to make claims that can in principle be tested — and then test them.

There is, however, plenty of room for philosophy in science — look no further than Jim Holt’s fantastic, mind-bending, and oddly soothing Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story, one of the best philosophy books of 2012.

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