Jay Matthews

This is why art matters: because it dredges our psychic depths in ways that even the artist may not understand. “The arts,” writes the Zen poet Gary Snyder, following Levi-Strauss, “are the wilderness areas of the imagination, surviving like national parks in the midst of civilized minds.” Strange things grow in the wilderness; unusual plants... See more

 I look at it, certainly, inside relationships and how we reconcile these two fundamental needs that often spring from different sources and pull us in different directions. And I also think that love and desire belong, a little bit, to both of these sets of human needs, as well. So they relate, and they also conflict. And herein lies the mystery

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One to One: On maps, cartography and our relationship with geographical enquiry over time stretching from ancient Babylon to GIS software. With increasingly sophisticated tools to build maps, "we have the means to comprehend the future.

"We are each at the centre of our own map... We are all innate mapmakers... maps [are the] mediators between an... See more

These forces, in turn, were accelerated by the increasingly winner-take-all dynamics of the economy that were unleashed by the demise of traditional industries and regulations.

What is finally at stake in Futurism’s explosive myth is thus, paradoxically, the power of presence—nostalgic and times, but also ironic and even grotesque— within chaos. For if the dark night of Futurism can be figured alternatively and all at once as anarchism (the destruction of political ideology and artistic convention), nihilism (the... See more

For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those... See more

Maria Popova reflects on the different worlds of Lightman's book, describing the different ways in which different worlds relate to time.