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Николай МихайловWhat Is Love? Famous Definitions from 200 Years of Literary History
“Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get — only with what you are expecting to give — which is everything.” After those collections of notable definitions of art, science, and philosophy, what better way to start a new year than with a selection of poetic definitions of a peculiar phenomenon that is at once more amorphous than art, more single-minded than science, and more philosophical than philosophy itself? Gathered here are some of the most memorable and timeless insights...
Brain PickingsJohn Cleese on the 5 Factors to Make Your Life More Creative
‘Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating.’ Much has been said about how creativity works, its secrets, its origins, and what we can do to optimize ourselves for it. In this excerpt from his fantastic 1991 lecture, John Cleese offers a recipe for creativity, delivered with his signature blend of cultural insight and comedic genius. Specifically, Cleese outlines “the 5 factors that you can arrange to make your lives more creative”: Space (“You can’t become playful, and therefore...
Explore – Decades prior to this bold public display of queer...
Decades prior to this bold public display of queer affection, African American female couples in New York strategized alternative ways to obtain marriage licenses in the 1920s and 30s. Fascinating read on queer African American women and the history of marriage.
ExploreWhat Would You Do If Money Were No Object? Alan Watts on the Life of Purpose
One key question for breaking free of consumer culture’s hamster wheel. British philosopher and writer Alan Watts (1915-1973), author of the cult-classic The Way of Zen, played a key role in popularizing Eastern philosophy in the West, like John Cage had done, in the middle of the 20th century. In this short remix video, a fine complement to this omnibus of wisdom on how to find your purpose and do what you love, Watts asks the seemingly simple question of what you would do if money were no...
"We have to make it work, and we have to make it fun... because the client won't go away." MoMA's @juliahoffman on in-house design.
Explore – At the American Academy in Rome, filmmaker...
At the American Academy in Rome, filmmaker Nicholas Heller follows Visiting Artist Ann Weber on her daily rounds, scavenging cardboard boxes out of dumpsters, collecting ideas from architectural details and Bernini sculptures and creating sculpture in her studio.
Ordering the Heavens: A Visual History of Mapping the Universe | Brain Pickings
07 JULY, 2011 by Maria Popova From Copernicus to Ancient Korea, or what the Chinese concept of change has to do with Aztec astrology. The love of maps is a running theme here at Brain Pickings, from these 7 must-read books on creative cartography to, most recently, BBC’s fantastic documentary on important medieval maps. Humanity’s long history of visual sensemaking is as much a source of timeless inspiration as a living record of how our collective understanding of the universe and...
The It-Doesn’t-Matter Suit: Sylvia Plath’s Lovely, Little-Known Vintage Children’s Book
A charming cautionary tale about the perils of self-consciousness. Sylvia Plath — celebrated poet, little-known artist, lover of the world, repressed “addict of experience”, steamy romancer … and children’s book author? Given my soft spot for lesser-known vintage children’s books by famous literary icons, I was delighted to discover The It-Doesn’t-Matter Suit (public library) — a charming children’s story Plath penned shortly before having her first child. Though her journals indicate it was...
"In design … you have a problem that existed outside of yourself. … [In art], you have to pose the problem." exp.lore.com/post/4402106...
The wake times of famous graphic designers exp.lore.com/post/4357580...
History’s 100 Geniuses of Language and Literature, Visualized
“Genius, in its writings, is our best path for reaching wisdom … the true use of literature for life.” “Genius is nothing more nor less than doing well what anyone can do badly,” Victorian novelist Amelia E. Barr reflected in her 9 rules for success. But what, exactly, is genius? In their latest project, Italian visualization wizard Giorgia Lupi and her team at Accurat — who have previously given us a timeline of the future based on famous fiction, a visual history of the Nobel Prize, and a...
Iconic Designer Henry Dreyfuss on Beauty, Serenity, and Shaping Public Taste
“Man achieves his tallest measure of serenity when surrounded by beauty.” The role of the singer, argued Lilli Lehmann in 1902, is to educate people about good music. The role of the writer, argued E. B. White in 1969, is to educate people about good writing. In his 1955 classic Designing for People (public library), legendary industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss, mastermind of such cultural staples as the very first answering machine and the once-ubiquitous Hoover vacuum cleaner, considers the...
Logo Life: The Visual Evolution of 100 Iconic Logos
“Newton… a mind forever voyaging through strange seas of thought…alone.” It takes a special kind of creative alchemy to transmute image into icon and catalyze a cultural cult driven by a commanding brand identity. Logo Life: Life Histories of 100 Famous Logos (public library) from Dutch publisher BIS and creative director Ron van der Vlugt offers exactly what it says on the tin, covering brands as diverse yet uniformly enduring as Apple, LEGO, adidas, Google, Xerox, and VISA. Each short chapter...
Stanley Kubrick’s Jazz Photography and The Film He Almost Made About Jazz Under Nazi Rule
Stanley Kubrick (looking like a creepy Rowan Atkinson above) came of age as a chess-hustling photographer in the jazz-saturated New York City of the 1940s. He began taking pictures at the age of thirteen, when his father bought him a Graflex camera. During his teenage years, Kubrick flirted with a career as a jazz drummer but abandoned the pursuit, instead joining Look Magazine as its youngest staff photographer right out of high school in 1945. His regard for jazz music and culture did not...
Open CultureAmbiverts, problem-finders, and the surprising secrets of selling your ideas | Brain Pickings
by Maria Popova “It is in fact the discovery and creation of problems rather than any superior knowledge, technical skill, or craftsmanship that often sets the creative person apart.” Whether it’s “selling” your ideas, your writing, or yourself to a potential mate, the art of the sell is crucial to your fulfillment in life, both personal and professional. So argues Dan Pink in To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others (public library; UK) — a provocative anatomy of the...
ON! at the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati: Observer Media: Design Observer
In this special Design Matters video episode, Debbie Millman gives you on a preview the new exhibit ON! at the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati. ON! is an interactive experience — the viewer is also a player, tinkerer, maker and collaborator. This exhibit features some of the world's brightest minds exploring design and technology who use code and circuitry as adeptly as paper, ink and canvas. The artists personify the new reality of creative production today: genre-bending ingenuity at...
Observer Media fro...
Support our Autotag.me project in its Indiegogo campaign and became a part of the Image Revolution! www.indiegogo.com/project...
Love in the Age of Data: How One Woman Hacked Her Way to Happily Ever After
Reverse-engineering the algorithms of romance, one picky data point at a time. The question of how love works has bedeviled writers and scientists for centuries. But how do the dynamics of romance differ in the age of online dating? In Data, A Love Story: How I Gamed Online Dating to Meet My Match (public library; UK), digital strategist and journalist Amy Webb — one of the smartest people I know — takes us on her unexpected journey to true love, in which she sets out to “game the system, using...
Alligators All Around: A Maurice Sendak Alphabet Book from 1962
Juggling jellybeans, keeping kangaroos, and other shockingly spoiled yackety-yacking. As a lover of alphabet books and of all things Maurice Sendak, I was delighted to get my hands on an original 1962 edition of Sendak’s Alligators All Around: An Alphabet — a charming, tiny gem that tells the non-narrative story of an alligator family who go about their daily business as young readers explore the progression of the alphabet. Even with so few words and such simple illustrations, Sendak’s...
How chemistry works: Gorgeous vintage science diagrams from 1854 | Brain Pickings
by Maria Popova Illustrated retro reactions from the father of Popular Science. Edward Livingston Youmans (1821-1887), best-remembered as the founder of Popular Science magazine, was one of history’s greatest science writers and editors. Besides pioneering what Richard Feynman has termed “the role of scientific culture in modern society” with his journalistic endeavors, Youmans also authored a number of beautifully illustrated textbooks, including Chemical Atlas: Or, The Chemistry of Familiar...
The Reconstructionists
The Reconstructionists, a collaboration between illustrator Lisa Congdon and writer Maria Popova, is a yearlong celebration of remarkable women — beloved artists, writers, and scientists, as well as notable unsung heroes — who have changed the way we define ourselves as a culture and live our lives as individuals of any gender.Every Monday in 2013, we'll be publishing an illustrated portrait of one such trailblazing woman, along with a hand-lettered quote that captures her spirit and a short...
Absolutely rocking photo of Sister Rosetta Tharpe, godmother of rock and roll, with her white coat and electric guitar exp.lore.com/post/4174181...
A 5-Step Technique for Producing Ideas circa 1939
“…the habit of mind which leads to a search for relationships between facts becomes of the highest importance in the production of ideas.” Literature is the original “inter-net,” woven of a web of allusions, references, and citations that link different works together into an endless rabbit hole of discovery. Case in point: Last week’s wonderful field guide to creativity, Dancing About Architecture, mentioned in passing an intriguing old book originally published by James Webb Young in 1939 — A...
The Cats of Copenhagen: A Newly Discovered James Joyce Children’s Story
A charming, irreverent picture-book based on Joyce’s letters to his only grandson. As a connoisseur of little-known children’s books by famous authors of literature for grown-ups, I already knew that James Joyce had penned the charming 1965 picture-book The Cat and the Devil, based on a 1936 letter to his most beloved audience, his grandson Stephen. So imagine my delight at the news of a posthumous Joyce children’s release, The Cats of Copenhagen (public library) — a never-before-published...
Explore – Using DNA would finally divorce the thing that...
Using DNA would finally divorce the thing that stores information from the things that read it. Time and again, our storage formats become obsolete because we stop making the machines that read them—think about video tapes, cassettes, or floppy disks. That’s a faff—it means that archivists have to constantly replace all their equipment, and laboriously rewrite their documents in the new format du jour, all at great expense. But we will always want to read DNA. It’s the molecule of life.
The science of which came first, the chicken or the egg, animated | Brain Pickings
by Maria Popova What the ancient proto-chicken has to do with how wolves became dogs. Since the dawn of recorded history, philosophers have pondered which came first, the chicken or the egg, as a causality dilemma exploring grander existential inquiries into the origin of life and the universe. But, it turns out, science has an answer that bypasses the metaphysical and dives right into the nitty-gritty of the tangible and concrete. In yet another illuminating animation, AsapSCIENCE enlist...
Charles Eames in 15 Quotes for His 105th Birthday | Brain Pickings
15 JUNE, 2012 by Maria Popova “Beyond the age of information is the age of choices.” This Sunday marks the 105th birthday of Charles Eames — legendary furniture designer, deft universe-explainer, celebrated champion of design as a force of culture, creative genius of uncommon sincerity, honesty, conviction, affection, imagination, and humor. 100 Quotes by Charles Eames is a tiny gem of a book, originally published in 2007, full of exactly what it says on the tin. Each of the 100...
Isabella Rossellini's Kooky Educational Films about Bees | Brain Pickings
27 JUNE, 2012 by Maria Popova What Shakespeare and Aristotle got wrong, how bee spit becomes honey, and why having sex all day makes one totally helpless. As the granddaughter of a beekeeper, I’ve always found bees to be utterly amazing and their social organization remarkably intelligent, so it breaks my heart to see their future so woefully precarious in the grip of colony collapse disorder. Yet despite their marvels and recent newsworthiness, bees remain largely misunderstood....
Paperman - Blog - Etre
A beautiful, Oscar-nominated short from Disney that fuses computer-generated and hand-drawn animation techniques: Previous article: Easy Way Subtitles Bookmark this page Add this page to your list of social bookmarks. BackflipBlinkBitsBlinklistBlogmarksBuddymarksCiteUlikeConnoteaDel.icio.usDe.lirio.usDiggFeedMarkerFeed Me LinksFurlGive a LinkGraveeHyperlinkomaticIgooiKinjaLilistoLinkagogoLinkrollLooklaterMa.gnoliaMapleMesFavsNetvouzNewsvineRaw...
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10 Rules for Students, Teachers, and Life by John Cage and Sister Corita Kent
“Nothing is a mistake. There’s no win and no fail, there’s only make.” Buried in various corners of the web is a beautiful and poignant list titled Some Rules for Students and Teachers, attributed to John Cage, who passed away twenty years ago this week. The list, however, originates from celebrated artist and educator Sister Corita Kent and was created as part of a project for a class she taught in 1967-1968. It was subsequently appropriated as the official art department rules at the college...
Love this vintage photo of early construction of Grand Central Station, which celebrates its 100th birthday today exp.lore.com/post/4202984...
7 Must-See What's My Line Episodes | Brain Pickings
by Maria Popova TED, Marilyn Monroe, and what girdles have to do with civic activism. In the 1950′s, the popular TV gameshow What’s My Line? cemented America’s relationship with television as an entertainment medium and a voyeuristic window into celebrity culture. The premise of the show was simple: In each episode, a contestant would appear in front of a panel of blindfolded culture pundits — with few exceptions, a regular lineup of columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, actress Arlene Francis, Random...
Explore – The important feature that design brings is this...
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.] 286 plays The important feature that design brings is this bridge between the science and the arts. And I don’t think many people understand the power of design to put these two things together. […] It doesn’t occur to them that everything is design – every building, everything they touch in the world is designed. The...
Wow. Adam Ferriss uses open-source code to rearrange pixels from old photographs into mesmerizing moving compositions exp.lore.com/post/4199669...
Chuck Close on Creativity, Work Ethic, and Problem-Solving vs. Problem-Creating
“Inspiration is for amateurs — the rest of us just show up and get to work.” Questions of why creators create, how they structure their days, and where they look for inspiration hold a strange kind of mesmerism over us mere mortals, an elusive promise of somehow reverse-engineering and absorbing genius through voyeurism. In 2003, artist Joe Fig began interviewing famous painters about how, where, and why they do what they do. The result was Inside the Painter’s Studio (UK; public library) — an...