Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
Maria Popova, who writes the popular site The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings), spends her days reading old books and essays. She’s passionate about finding ideas, beauty, and wisdom in these texts and then connecting them in her own unique conversation with the world.
Paul Millerd • The Pathless Path: Imagining a New Story For Work and Life
It is sometimes argued that our body temperature is set at 98.6 degrees for the same reason that we feel comfortable in a room at 70 degrees. A little over two million years ago, humans emerged in Africa in sites where the median daily temperature is in the low 70s. Thus, a body temperature in the high 90s optimizes the necessary dissipation of hea
... See moreGino Segre • A Matter of Degrees: What Temperature Reveals about the Past and Future of Our Species, Planet, and U niverse
During the last ice age, small bands of sapiens huddled in the caves of Germany’s Swabian Alps, playing flutes fashioned from mammoth ivory and vulture bone.
Adriana Barton • Wired for Music: A Search for Health and Joy Through the Science of Sound
It is not your mother who holds dominion over your adult life, but the ideology that proclaims that each of us has been determined in the first hours after birth, or during birth itself, the ideology that proclaims a series of tiny causes and accumulating effects lead to how you are today and how you will affect your own children. You are the direc
... See moreJames Hillman • The Soul's Code
Observing that many geniuses also had eminent relatives, he concluded that genius was hereditary. Strikingly, he did not seriously consider that the family clusters might indicate the importance of connections, wealth, or family culture, nor did he think the absence of women from his list was due to a lack of opportunity.
Samuel W. Franklin • The Cult of Creativity: A Surprisingly Recent History
"Authorship"-in the sense we know it today, individual intellectual effort related to the book as an economic commodity-was practically unknown before the advent of print technology. Medieval scholars were indifferent to the precise identity of the "books" they studied. In turn, they rarely signed even what was clearly their own. They were a humble
... See more
Daedalus Howell
@bibliotech
So which is to blame: biology, culture, or our parents? Are we exaggerating the effects of our families on our psychological development or underestimating them? How much responsibility do parents have for the psychological wounds with which children grow up?