Sublime

In possessing Schopenhauer the world possesses a personality the richer; a somewhat garrulous personality it may be; a curiously whimsical and sensitive personality, full of quite ordinary superstitions, of extravagant vanities, selfish, at times violent, rarely generous; a man whom during his lifetime nobody quite knew, an isolated creature, self-

It took only a couple of weeks of working for Sam before Caroline Ellison called her mother and sobbed into the phone that she’d just made the biggest mistake of her life. She’d first met Sam at Jane Street, in the summer before her senior year at Stanford, after he’d been assigned to teach her class of interns how to trade. “I was kind of, like, t

In 1894, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Albert Michelson proclaimed: “The

The adult brain, once believed to be hopelessly “fixed and immutable,” is now thought capable of much greater plasticity than ever before.

Freud, in other words – like Musil and Mann, but in a different kind of language – is describing a loss of confidence in our knowledge of the good, of the good as something we can both recognize, and aspire to live by, whatever our versions of the good happen to be (after psychoanalysis, distinctions between good and evil become less tenable, less

nihilisme neurologique », si l’on en croit le chercheur psychiatre Norman Doidge.

“A little learning is a dangerous thing; / Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.”)

Nor is she simply a memory machine, one of those prototypical top students with a capacity for ingesting vast amounts of unfiltered information. She is sensitive and acute, her opinions are unfailingly original, and, shy and nervous as she is, she stubbornly holds her ground in any argument.