Brain Pickings

One of the commonest and most corrosive human reflexes is to react to helplessness with anger. We do it in our personal lives and we do it in our political lives.

We are living through a time of uncommon helplessness and uncertainty, touching ...

“The high value put upon every minute of time, th...

Language is the chalice we lift to our lips to taste our own experience — a vessel that constrains what it contains by giving it its own shape. The more complex our experience, the more muddled the emotions that comprise it, the more it spills outside what la...

“A person’s identity,” Amin Maalouf wrote as he contemplated what he so poetically called <...

Tove Jansson (August 9, 1914–June 27, 2001) is among the most imaginative, important, and influential children’s book crea...