New Year's Resolution Reading List: 9 Essential Books on Reading and Writing by Maria Popova Dancing with the absurdity of life, or what symbolism has to do with the osmosis of trash and treasure. Hardly anything does one’s mental, spiritual, and creative health more good than resolving to read more and write better. Today’s reading list addresses these parallel aspirations. And since the number of books written about reading and writing likely far exceeds the reading capacity of a single human lifetime, this omnibus couldn’t be — shouldn’t be — an exhaustive list. It is, instead, a collection of timeless texts bound to radically improve your relationship with the written word, from whichever side of the equation you approach it. If anyone can make grammar fun, it’s Maira Kalman — The Elements of Style Illustrated marries Kalman’s signature whimsy with Strunk and White’s indispensable style guide to create an instant classic. On a related unmissable note, let the Elements of Style Rap make your day. On the itch of writing, Lamott banters: On why we read and write:
7 Nonfiction Children's Books Blending Whimsy and Education by Maria Popova From typography to tsunamis by way of quantum physics, or what Langston Hughes has to do with LEGO. Artful and fanciful children’s books make frequent cameos around here. Part of what makes them so great is their ability to whisk the young reader away into an alternate reality full of whimsy and possibility. But the present reality is often full of so much fascination we need not escape it to have our curiosity and imagination tickled. We’ve previously seen how comic books can be a medium for nonfiction, and today we turn to 7 wonderful kind-of-children’s books that bring imaginative storytelling to real, and in many cases serious, issues for young minds to ponder. Images via Imprint Prolific poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist Langston Hughes is considered one of the fathers of jazz poetry, a literary art form that emerged in the 1920s and eventually became the foundation for modern hip-hop. HT @Lissa Rhys; images courtesy of Mark Batty Publisher
Charles Darwin's List of the Pros and Cons of Marriage by Maria Popova “My God, it is intolerable to think of spending one’s whole life, like a neuter bee, working, working, & nothing after all.” “The day of days!,” wrote 29-year-old Charles Darwin in his journal on November 11, 1838, after his cousin, Emma Wedgwood, accepted his marriage proposal. If not marry Travel. Several weeks later, in July of 1838, he revisited the subject, with another meditation on the value of a life-partner (“better than a dog anyhow”): This is the Question [circled in pencil]MarryChildren — (if it Please God) — Constant companion, (& friend in old age) who will feel interested in one, — object to be beloved & played with. — better than a dog anyhow.– Home, & someone to take care of house — Charms of music & female chit-chat. — These things good for one’s health. — but terrible loss of time. He then produces his conclusion: Marry — Mary — Marry Q.E.D. …and moves on to the next question: It being proved necessary to MarryWhen? Six months later, the two were married.
How to Find Your Purpose and Do What You Love “Find something more important than you are,” philosopher Dan Dennett once said in discussing the secret of happiness, “and dedicate your life to it.” But how, exactly, do we find that? Surely, it isn’t by luck. Every few months, I rediscover and redevour Y-Combinator founder Paul Graham’s fantastic 2006 article, How to Do What You Love. What you should not do, I think, is worry about the opinion of anyone beyond your friends. More of Graham’s wisdom on how to find meaning and make wealth can be found in Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age. Alain de Botton, modern philosopher and creator of the “literary self-help genre”, is a keen observer of the paradoxes and delusions of our cultural conceits. In The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, he takes his singular lens of wit and wisdom to the modern workplace and the ideological fallacies of “success.” His terrific 2009 TED talk offers a taste: One of the interesting things about success is that we think we know what it means. 16.
Share Book Recommendations With Your Friends, Join Book Clubs, Answer Trivia The Best Science Books of 2012 by Maria Popova From cosmology to cosmic love, or what your biological clock has to do with diagraming evolution. It’s that time of year again, the time for those highly subjective, grossly non-exhaustive, yet inevitable and invariably fun best-of reading lists. To kick off the season, here are, in no particular order, my ten favorite science books of 2012. (Catch up on last year’s reading list here.) “Six hours’ sleep for a man, seven for a woman, and eight for a fool,” Napoleon famously prescribed. In fact, each of us possesses a different chronotype — an internal timing type best defined by your midpoint of sleep, or midsleep, which you can calculate by dividing your average sleep duration by two and adding the resulting number to your average bedtime on free days, meaning days when your sleep and waking times are not dictated by the demands of your work or school schedule. The distribution of midsleep in Central Europe. The scissors of sleep. Chronotypes vary with age: Stewart writes:
The Mohawks Who Built Manhattan For generations, Mohawk Indians have left their reservations in or near Canada to raise skyscrapers in the heart of New York City. High atop a New York University building one bright September day, Mohawk ironworkers were just setting some steel when the head of the crew heard a big rumble to the north. Suddenly a jet roared overhead, barely 50 feet from the crane they were using to set the steel girders in place. “I looked up and I could see the rivets on the plane, I could read the serial numbers it was so low, and I thought ‘What is he doing going down Broadway?’” recalls the crew’s leader, Dick Oddo. At first, Oddo says, he thought it was pilot error. Like Oddo, most of the Mohawk crews working in New York City on Sept. 11, 2001, headed immediately to the site of the disaster. In the months that followed, many Mohawk ironworkers volunteered to help in the cleanup. Walking the iron Mohawks have been building skyscrapers for six generations. Then tragedy struck. Gangs of New York
Brain Pickings | Love - Part 13 05 JUNE, 2013By: Maria Popova “Do not amend by reasoning, but by example; approach feeling by feeling; do not hope to excite love except by love.” “Anxiety is love’s greatest killer,” Anaïs Nin admonished.“It creates the failures. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. Swiss philosopher, poet, and critic Henri-Frédéric Amiel (1821 — 1881) — a man of brilliant mind and tormented soul — is one of those peculiar figures who, not unlike Anaïs Nin herself, attained only marginal acclaim for their formal body of work, but whose posthumously published private journals have gone on to become timeless masterpieces of philosophy and literary thought. In the original introduction, French critic M. The man who, during his lifetime, was incapable of giving us any deliberate or conscious work worthy of his powers, has now left us, after his death, a book which will not die. Among Amiel’s greatest, most abiding insights are his conflicted thoughts on love.
30 Amazing Resources for Sass Lovers Despite the predictions of countless skeptics, Sass hasn’t proved to be a fad at all, but rather a remarkably robust set of tools that genuinely improve CSS authoring. I’m a huge Sass fan and I know many of you are too, so I’ve compiled this list of thirty amazing resources for Sass lovers. In it you’ll find all kinds of goodies built on and for Sass: frameworks, plugins, apps and a lot more. Frameworks and Grid Systems Compass Compass is the quintessential companion to Sass. Bourbon Sass Mixins Library If Compass seems like overkill for you, but you still like the idea of leveraging some awesome CSS3 mixins, check out Bourbon. Bourbon Neat Bourbon Neat is a grid system built with Sass and Bourbon. Foundation Foundation is the main competitor to Twitter Bootstrap. Bootstrap Sass If you’re dead set on using both Bootstrap and Sass, check out this project, which essentially rewrites the LESS Bootstrap components in Sass. Animate.sass Forge Skeleton-SASS Susy: Responsive grids for Compass Frameless
The Art of Being Still Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing. Many of the aspiring writers I know talk about writing more than they actually write. Instead of setting free the novel or short story or essay that is sizzling at the ends of their fingers, desperate to set fire to the world, they fret about writer’s block or about never having the time to write. Yet as they complain, they spend a whole lot of that precious time posting cartoons about writing on Facebook or putting up statuses about how if they only had more free time they just know they could get their novels written. The problem is, too many writers today are afraid to be still. The people who see me out in the world might scoff at this since I am nearly always in motion, but those who know me best realize that I am being still even in my most active moments. Most writers today have jobs or families or responsibilities, and most often, all three. There is no way to learn how to do this except by simply doing it. Sarah Williamson
World Microscopy Market: Products, Applications and Forecasts (2010 -2015), Market Research Report The global microscopy market is poised to reach USD 6.72 Billion by 2021 from USD 4.68 Billion in 2016, at a CAGR of 7.5% from 2016 to 2021. In this report, the global microscopy market is broadly segmented by product, application, end user, and region. By type of product, the microscopy market is categorized into optical microscopes, confocal microscopes, electron microscopes, and scanning probe microscopes. The optical microscopes segment is further segmented into fluorescence microscopes, and super-resolution microscopes. Based on application, the microscopy market is broadly classified into semiconductors, life sciences, nanotechnology, and material sciences. On the basis of end user, the microscopy market is categorized into academic institutions, industries, and other end users (government research institutes and private laboratories). Growth of this market is propelled by the rising worldwide focus on nanotechnology and favorable government and corporate funding. Stakeholders
The Daily Routines of Famous Writers By Maria Popova UPDATE: These daily routines have now been adapted into a labor-of-love visualization of writers’ sleep habits vs. literary productivity. Kurt Vonnegut’s recently published daily routine made we wonder how other beloved writers organized their days. So I pored through various old diaries and interviews — many from the fantastic Paris Review archives — and culled a handful of writing routines from some of my favorite authors. Enjoy. Ray Bradbury, a lifelong proponent of working with joy and an avid champion of public libraries, playfully defies the question of routines in this 2010 interview: My passions drive me to the typewriter every day of my life, and they have driven me there since I was twelve. Joan Didion creates for herself a kind of incubation period for ideas, articulated in this 1968 interview: I need an hour alone before dinner, with a drink, to go over what I’ve done that day. E. I never listen to music when I’m working. Photograph by Tom Palumbo, 1956
Networked Knowledge and Combinatorial Creativity by Maria Popova Why creativity is like LEGO, or what Richard Dawkins has to do with Susan Sontag and Gandhi. In May, I had the pleasure of speaking at the wonderful Creative Mornings free lecture series masterminded by my studiomate Tina of Swiss Miss fame. These are pages from the most famous florilegium, completed by Thomas of Ireland in the 14th century. In talking about these medieval manuscripts, Adam Gopnik writes in The New Yorker: Our minds were altered less by books than by index slips.” Which is interesting, recognizing not only the absolute vale of content but also its relational value, the value not just of information itself but also of information architecture, not just of content but also of content curation. You may have heard this anecdote. Here’s the same sentiment from iconic designer Paula Scher on the creation of the famous Citi logo: Kind of LEGOs. And iconic novelist Vladimir Nabokov was a secret lepidopterist — he collected and studied butterflies religiously.