Molly Snowden

“Zero is, by many mathematicians, definitely considered one of the greatest — or maybe the greatest — achievement of mankind,” said the neuroscientist Andreas Nieder, who studies animal and human intelligence at the University of Tübingen in Germany. “It took an eternity until mathematicians finally invented zero as a number.”

Many of us spend our lives pursuing private acceptance through external success. But no matter the award or honor, our inner doubts will remain. True acceptance comes from inside us. It takes asking ourselves challenging questions like: What do I want from my work? What’s most important about it to me ? How would I create my work differently if I p... See more

But in “Braiding Sweetgrass,” you write about nature as capable of showing us love. If that’s true, doesn’t it also have to be capable of showing us the opposite? The answer that comes to mind is that it’s not all about us.

What?! [Laughs.] Some of these cycles of creation and destruction that promote renewal and change might be bad for us, but we’... See more

Attention is what creates value. Artworks are made as well by how people interact with them — and therefore by what quality of interaction they can inspire. So how do we assess an artist who we suspect is dreadful but who manages to inspire the right storm of attention, and whose audience seems to swoon in the appropriate way? We say, ‘Well done.’

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“It is never as often as we would like that a beautiful and brilliant woman steps away from her assigned role of helpmeet, of mother, of daughter and muse. So we celebrate the ones who we believe – on some artistic plane – were set free.”

Conceiving of something as a gift changes your relationship to it in a profound way, even though the physical makeup of the “thing” has not changed. A woolly knit hat that you purchase at the store will keep you warm regardless of its origin, but if it was hand knit by your favorite auntie, then you are in relationship to that “thing” in a very dif... See more