Jay Matthews

A vocation is a career that not only gives you fulfillment — meaning, flow, freedom — but that also has a definitive goal or a clear purpose to strive for attached to it, which drives your life and motivates you to get up in the morning.

Proposition 4. Because attempts to control and coordinate activities in institutionalized organizations lead to conflicts and loss of legitimacy, elements of structure are decoupled from activities and from each other.

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We have been living a myth. We have constructed a dream. We have cajoled and seduced ourselves into believing we are the center of all things; with plants and other sentient beings from ants to lizards to coyotes and grizzly bears, remaining subservient to our whims, desires, and needs. This is a lethal lie that will be seen by future generations... See more

More than the picture itself, what counts is what it throws into the air, what it exhales. It doesn’t matter if the image is destroyed. Art can die; what matters is that it scatters seeds on the ground. An artwork must be fertile. It must give birth to a world. But we mustn’t stop there; the picture must make everything clear; it must fertilize the... See more

The problem here, Fromm emphasizes, is not whether or not the beliefs are correct—the problem is whether or not the beliefs are a result of one’s own thinking. It is certainly possible that someone, through their original reasoning, can arrive at the same beliefs as the person I described above. The difference is that they came to these beliefs... See more

A wicked problem is one where there are a plethora of ways to work towards the vision with multiple parties, people, systems, processes, and interactions that may impact or be impacted by the solution.

Physicists have long noted that their descriptions of the universe were not only accurate and precise, but also seemed to have an intrinsic, even surprising beauty. Wilczek aims to convince us that even if we cannot do physics, we can be amazed and inspired by this beauty, no differently from how we respond to works of art and music.

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