George Saunders on the Power of Kindness, Animated With his gentle wisdom and disarming warmth, Saunders manages to dissolve some of our most deeply engrained culturally conditioned cynicism into a soft and expansive awareness of the greatest gift one human being can give another — those sacred exchanges that take place in a moment of time, often mundane and fleeting, but echo across a lifetime with inextinguishable luminosity. In this immeasurably wonderful animated teaser for the book, narrated by Saunders himself, illustrator Tim Bierbaum brings to life the author’s words: I’d say, as a goal in life, you could do worse than: Try to be kinder.In seventh grade, this new kid joined our class. Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter.
Our Brains and Art 9Share Synopsis While most people know on some level that the arts can reach and move us in unique ways, there is actually science behind this. I am a sociologist by training. I come from academic world, reading scholarly articles on topics of social import, but they're almost always boring, dry and quickly forgotten. Yet I can't count how many times I've gone to a movie, a theater production or read a novel and been jarred into seeing something differently, learned something new, felt deep emotions and retained the insights gained. The arts can tap into issues that are otherwise out of reach and reach people in meaningful ways. The turn by many scholars to arts-based research is most simply explained by my opening example of comparing the experience of consuming jargon-filled and inaccessible academic articles to that of experiencing artistic works. Natalie Phillips (2012) used the fiction of Jane Austen in a study about how reading affects the brain. In 1963 famed sociologist Lewis A.
How to Navigate the Murky Waters of Workplace Friendships: Wisdom from Adam Smith and Aristotle by Maria Popova “Is not mistaking relationships for what they are not — that is being blind to their ambiguity — arguably the greatest cause of disappointment and failure?” “A condition of friendship, is the abdication of power over another, indeed the abdication even of the wish for power over one another,” Andrew Sullivan wrote in his beautiful meditation on why friendship is a greater gift than romantic love. Vernon, who echoes Rilke’s memorable words and notes that “the value of asking about friendship lies in the asking, not necessarily in coming to any incontestable conclusions,” argues that one of the defining characteristics of friendship is its inherent ambiguity — unlike social institutions of belonging like marriage or the workplace, it doesn’t operate by clear social norms or contractually defined roles, it comes with “no predetermined instructions for assembly or project for growth.” Illustration by Maurice Sendak from 'I’ll Be You and You Be Me' by Ruth Krauss, 1954.
Movers and makers: the most powerful people in the art world | Art and design Gerhard Richter The greatest painter alive, and the most fastidious: his Cologne studio is spotless, every brush and squeegee clean. His diaries are a hoot too: "Art is wretched, cynical, stupid, helpless, confusing … worse than insanity" Ai Weiwei The most famous artist since Warhol, and a true polymath: sculptor, architect, digital pioneer, questionable heavy metal musician. Jeff Koons Cloyingly earnest, unfailingly polite and richer than you'll ever be. Cindy Sherman Conceptualist whose three decades of staged self-portraits – as a clown, as an heiress, as a Renaissance Madonna – transformed the reception of photography in museums and the market. Damien Hirst Like any shark, he has to keep moving to breathe. Isa Genzken If some kid's art looks innovative today, it's safe to assume Genzken did it 20 years ago. Matthew Barney Devastatingly handsome Yalie, baby-daddy to Björk, and the only heterosexual to spend a decade making art about muscles that raise and lower the testicles. Agnes Gund
A “Dynamic Interaction”: Leo Buscaglia on Why Love Is a Learned Language by Maria Popova From developmental psychology to Timothy Leary, a reframing of love as deliberate mastery rather than magical thinking. Love might be one of the most quintessential capacities of the human condition. And yet, for all our poetic contemplation, psycho-scientific dissection, and anthropological exploration of it, we greatly underestimate the extent to which this baseline capacity — much like those for language, motion, and creativity — is a dynamic ability to be mastered and cultivated rather than a static state to be passively beheld. Despite what we know about the value of “deliberate practice” in attaining excellence in any endeavor, the necessary toil of mastery, and the psychology of what it takes to acquire new habits, we remain gobsmackingly naive about the practice of love, approaching it instead with the magical-thinking expectation that we’re born excellent at it. He writes: Love is a learned, emotional reaction. One cannot give what he does not possess.
How Diego Rivera Met the Fierce Teenage Frida Kahlo and Fell in Love with Her Years Later by Maria Popova “I did not know it then, but Frida had already become the most important fact in my life. And she would continue to be, up to the moment she died…” There is something singularly mesmerizing about the fateful encounters that sparked epic, often turbulent, lifelong love affairs — take, for instance, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas or Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. But one of modern history’s most vibrant, passionate, and tumultuous loves is that between legendary artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, the unusual and enchanting beginning of which is recounted first-hand in My Art, My Life: An Autobiography (public library) — a rare glimpse of Rivera’s inner life posthumously published in 1960, based on the interviews Gladys March conducted with the artist while shadowing him between 1944 and his death in 1957. Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Mexico, 1933 (Photograph by Martin Munkácsi) 'Nothing compares to your hands, nothing like the green-gold of your eyes. Share on Tumblr
Taming the Mammoth: Why You Should Stop Caring What Other People Think | Page 2 of 2 | Wait But Why | Page 2 This is Part 2. Part 1 is here. Part 2: Taming the Mammoth Some people are born with a reasonably tame mammoth or raised with parenting that helps keep the mammoth in check. Others die without ever reining their mammoth in at all, spending their whole lives at its whim. Whatever your situation, there are three steps to getting your mammoth under your control: Step 1: Examine Yourself The first step to improving things is a clear and honest assessment of what’s going on in your head, and there are three parts of this: 1) Get to know your Authentic Voice This doesn’t sound that hard, but it is. There are cliché phrases for this process—”soul-searching” or “finding yourself”—but that’s exactly what needs to happen. 2) Figure out where the mammoth is hiding Most of the time a mammoth is in control of a person, the person’s not really aware of it. The most obvious way to find the mammoth is to figure out where your fear is—where are you most susceptible to shame or embarrassment? No. So like…
24 Haunting Images Of Abandoned Places That Will Give You Goose Bumps. #16 Is Insane. 1. I.M. Cooling Tower, Belgium These are parts of a cooling tower in an old power station in Monceau, Belgium. The trumpet-like structure in the middle introduced hot water to the structure, where it then cooled while dripping down hundreds of small concrete troughs and slats. 2. Kolmanskop was a small settlement in Namibia that saw a boom in the early 1900s when German settlers realized that the area was rich in diamonds. 3. 102-Year-Old Floating Forest in Sydney, Australia This is the hull of the SS Ayrfield, a large steam ship condemned to dismantling in Homebush Bay, Australia after WWII. 4. The Maunsell Sea Forts were erected near the Thames and Mersey rivers in Britain to help defend against potential German air or naval raids during WWII. 5. This house was part of what was once a fairly successful small island colony in Chesapeake Bay in the U.S. 6. Pripyat was established on Feb. 4th, 1970 in Ukraine near the border of Belarus as a Soviet nuclear city. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.
Recognizing Each Other in the Commons: The Basis for an Alternative Political Philosophy of Systemic Change? | Kosmos Journal By Helene Finidori Time is running short for a paradigm shift. When it comes to our individual and collective engagement in making the world a better place, we often talk about uniting in diversity: uniting in harmony to multiply outcomes and uniting in diversity for multiple focus and resilience. But how can this concretely be achieved? We all acknowledge the critical need for systemic change and for collective intelligence, but we all have different opinions about the challenges our world is facing and the ways to address these challenges. We each try to convince others that we hold the best solutions and methodologies, which often prevents us from coordinating or communing in effective ways. As agents of change, we gather around the social objects that our engagement and action logics attract us to, those that resonate the most with the way we see the world and that determine our priorities and the pathways we envision. We are facing a paradox.