“Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life.” “If you can fall in love again and again,” Henry Miller wrote as he contemplated the measure of a life well lived on the precipice of turning…
“It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it.” Galileo believed that books are our only means of having superhuman powers. For Carl Sagan, a book was “proof that humans are capable of working magic.” Proust considered the end of a book’s wisdom the…
“To see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.” In her stunning autobiographical reflection on the moment she understood what it means to be an artist, Virginia Woolf beheld the cosmos of connections in a single flower. Decades later, the Nobel-winning physicist Richard Feynman offered a different, complementary lens on the art of…
For all the enchantment the color blue has cast upon humanity, no animal has fallen under its spell more hopelessly than the bowerbird, whose very survival hinges on blue. In a small clearing on the forest floor, the male weaves twigs and branches into an elaborate bower, which he decorates exclusively with blue objects —…
We need free speech both to search for truth, and to express ourselves. When free speech is silenced, it interferes with both of those core human goals. And it therefore needs to be said loud and clear: silencing speech is a problem no matter who is doing the silencing. There is a position on free…
