“Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves.” Earlier this week, Jacqueline Novogratz’s wonderful commencement address reminded ...
What ink for the blind has to do with marine telegraphy and electrical pianos. The to-do list might be the secret to willpower, and it is certainly an essential tool of creativity, as anyone from Leo...
“Those who do not know the torment of the unknown cannot have the joy of discovery.” Last week, we took in some timeless vintage wisdom on the role of serendipity and chance-opportunism i...
Hume was a neuroscientist, or what early aviation has to do with the psychology of identity. We’ve already seen that the notions of stable character and fixed personality are a myth. And yet, o...
Dynamic animated anatomy of going viral. Viruses are everywhere — in our bodies, in the news, and, thanks to Hollywood, in some of our worst-case apocalyptic scenarios. But how, exactly, do the...
Lessons in the art of embracing identity from some of today’s most celebrated authors. After centuries of politically sanctioned bigotry, LGBT rights are finally achieving human rights status &...
“I was discovering a person on the cusp on becoming an adult, but desperately holding on to the child she barely outgrew, a person on the edge between two worlds.” We’ve already see...
Vintage black-and-white film explains the wonders of color vision. Human vision is one of the most remarkable capacities of our bodies, its precise mechanism the subject of much fascination, from gor...
What undersea cables have to do with Brooklyn squirrels. Do you ever stop to think what happens when a web page, like this one, manifests as digital text and image on your screen to transmit ideas be...
Mapping 450 years of mankind’s curiosity about the living world and the relationships between organisms. Since the dawn of recorded history, humanity has been turning to the visual realm as a s...
“Inspiring hope in a cynical world might be the most radical thing you can possibly do.” ‘Tis the season for exceptional graduation speeches, in which cultural icons bequeath their ...
Because the mundane can be magical, whatever your age. On the heels of last month’s omnibus of children’s books by famous graphic designers comes the charming Get Dressed! (public library...
The road to science is paved with failed intentions. To celebrate their second birthday, my friends at The Story Collider, the finest science storytelling show around, teamed up with American Museum ...
“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” As a lover of all things Alice in Wonderland, I was so taken with these glass lantern slides origin...
“To be perfectly original one should think much and read little, and this is impossible, for one must have read before one has learnt to think.” What a magical Rube Goldberg machine of di...
How to determine the distance of stars using standard candles. Somewhere between Fibonacci’s invention of arithmetic, which changed the world of numbers as we know it, and scientists’ amb...
Fear and loathing in six panels. The past few years have given us some stellar graphic nonfiction, lending the comic book genre to “grown-up” storytelling ranging from photojournalism to ...
Poignant and powerful portraits of physical and emotional survival amidst atrocity. Last year, French guerrilla street artist JR won the $100,000 TED Prize for his Inside Out project — a global...
What the cult of fact has to do with the essential condition for the survival of the human race. One need only look to British philosopher, mathematician, and sociocultural critic Bertrand Russell...
“We explore because we are curious, not because we wish to develop grand views of reality or better widgets.” The precise purpose of and drive for science has been debated by some of hist...
Fine-tuning the machinery of distinguishing the valid from the non-valid. Seven years ago this week, David Foster Wallace argued that “learning how to think really means learning how to exercis...
How we went from boulders to scrolls to screens. In 1968, Arthur C. Clarke predicted the iPad; in 1991, Francis Ford Coppola predicted YouTube; in 1993, Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’...
“If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.” The poet John Keats once described the ideal state of the psyche as negative capability — the ability “of being in uncert...
Stumbling on happiness in pursuit of the unknown. National Poetry Month might be over, but the celebration of book spine poetry doesn’t have to be. The latest installment tackles The Big One &#...
“Someone on the internet thinks what you’re doing is stupid, or evil, or it’s all been done before? Make good art.” On the heels of last week’s timeless commencement add...
The art-science of walking the fine line between keen and crass. Since its inception in 1925, The New Yorker has garnered remarkable reverence as much for its editorial style as it has for its inimit...
“Don’t bother about the commas which aren’t there, read the words. Don’t worry about the sense that is there, read the words faster.” In 1939, Gertrude Stein penned her ...
“Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.” For the past half-century, Joan Didion has been diss...
“The blizzard doesn’t last forever; it just seems so.” Famous advice on writing abounds — Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 tips on how to make a great story, David Ogilvy’s 10 no...
How the seventh art went from magic lanterns to state-of-the-art computer-generated imagery in 100 years. When a small handful of enthusiasts gathered at the first cinema show at the Grand Cafe in Pa...
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