360 Posts found for Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings)

Each thing we preconceive blinds us to what actually is — a tendency that, when it rises to the level of social perception in the form of stereotypes, metastasizes into a status quo that makes the powerful all the more powerful and the power-poor all the poorer.

Drawing on the pioneering psychologist William James […] Lippmann writes:

For the most part we do not first

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Authors: Maria Popova, Walter Lippmann | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (August 4, 2019) | Subjects: Excerpts, Intelligence | Knowledge

Years before Walter Lippmann explored stereotypes and the psychology of prejudice, rooted in the disquieting fact that “we do not first see, and then define, [but] define first and then see,” and decades before Hannah Arendt observed that “society has discovered discrimination as the great social weapon by which one may kill men without any bloodshed” before she … [ Read more ]

Authors: Elsie Clews Parsons, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (March 11, 2020) | Subjects: Excerpts, Immigration, Life & Society, Power, Sociology | Anthropology

“To bother to engage with problematic culture, and problematic people within that culture, is an act of love,” wrote the poet Elizabeth Alexander in contemplating power and possibility. Krista Tippett calls such engagement generous listening. And yet so much of our communication today is defined by a rather ungenerous unwillingness to listen coupled with a compulsion to speak.

The most perennially insightful and helpful remedy for … [ Read more ]

Authors: David Bohm, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (December 5, 2016) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Communication, Culture, Excerpts, Life & Society

1. Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind. Cultivate that capacity for “negative capability.” We live in a culture where one of the greatest social disgraces is not having an opinion, so we often form our “opinions” based on superficial impressions or the borrowed ideas of others, without investing the time and thought that cultivating true conviction necessitates. We then go around asserting

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Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (October 23, 2016) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Insight, Wisdom

[Tim] Ferriss distinguishes between two kinds of secrets — those we keep because we fear fleeting mortification, like accounts of embarrassing things we’ve done in sub-optimal moments, and dark secrets that paralyze us with deep shame, “the shadows we keep covered for fear of unraveling our lives.”

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“It’s easy to blow things out of proportion, to get lost in the story you tell yourself, and to … [ Read more ]

Authors: Maria Popova, Tim Ferriss | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (December 8, 2016) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Health & Medicine, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

One might … say that moving minds — our own as well as those of others — is among the most effortful labor there is.

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“When we wish to correct with advantage, and to show another that he errs, we must notice from what side he views the matter, for on that side it is usually true, and admit that truth to him, but reveal to … [ Read more ]

Authors: Blaise Pascal, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (May 20, 2015) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Communication, Excerpts

To live with sincerity in our culture of cynicism is a difficult dance — one that comes easily only to the very young and the very old. The rest of us are left to tussle with two polarizing forces ripping the psyche asunder by beckoning to it from opposite directions — critical thinking and hope. Critical thinking without hope is cynicism. Hope without critical thinking … [ Read more ]

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (February 9, 2015) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

How the emergence of IQ tests contracted rather than expanding our understanding of intelligence and what we can do to transcend their perilous cultural legacy is what practicing physician, research scientist, and Pulitzer-winning author Siddhartha Mukherjee explores throughout The Gene: An Intimate History — a rigorously researched, beautifully written detective story about the genetic components of what we experience as the self.

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A crucial agent in … [ Read more ]

Authors: Maria Popova, Siddhartha Mukherjee | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (November 30, 2016) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Intelligence | Knowledge, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior, Race Relations, Sociology | Anthropology

In every man, heredity and environment have combined to produce a creature of certain abilities and desires—including a deeply ingrained need to function in such a way that his life will be MEANINGFUL. A man has to BE something; he has to matter.

As I see it then, the formula runs something like this: a man must choose a path which will let his ABILITIES function … [ Read more ]

Authors: Hunter S. Thompson, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (November 4, 2013) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Career, Excerpts, Life & Society, Meaning, Personal Improvement

My question … was the simplest of questions, lying in the soul of every man from the foolish child to the wisest elder: it was a question without an answer to which one cannot live, as I had found by experience. It was: “What will come of what I am doing today or shall do tomorrow? What will come of my whole life?” Differently expressed,

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Authors: Leo Tolstoy, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (June 3, 2014) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Intelligence | Knowledge, Life & Society, Meaning, Philosophy, Psychology | Behavior, Religion

All human activity is prompted by desire. There is a wholly fallacious theory advanced by some earnest moralists to the effect that it is possible to resist desire in the interests of duty and moral principle. I say this is fallacious, not because no man ever acts from a sense of duty, but because duty has no hold on him unless he desires to be

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Authors: Bertrand Russell, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (September 21, 2015) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Psychology | Behavior

“Do you have the courage to bring forth the treasures that are hidden within you?” This is among life’s most abiding questions and the history of human creativity — our art and our poetry and most empathically all of our philosophy — is the history of attempts to answer it.

There is no drearier, sorrier creature in nature than the man who has evaded his own

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Authors: Friedrich Nietzsche, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (September 30, 2015) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Philosophy

It’s the oldest story ever told. The story of belief — of the basic, irresistible, universal human need to believe in something that gives life meaning, something that reaffirms our view of ourselves, the world, and our place in it… For our minds are built for stories. We crave them, and, when there aren’t ready ones available, we create them. Stories about our origins. Our … [ Read more ]

Authors: Maria Konnikova, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (January 12, 2016) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Psychology | Behavior, Trust

“The notion of obligations comes before that of rights, which is subordinate and relative to the former. A right is not effectual by itself, but only in relation to the obligation to which it corresponds.” – Simone Weil

Nowhere do we muddle these two notions more liberally than in our treatment of democracy and its foundational principle of equality — a basic right to be conferred … [ Read more ]

Authors: C.S. Lewis, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (November 29, 2016) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Politics & Public Policy

In the variedly stimulating 1976 volume The Identities of Persons, philosopher Amelie Rorty considers the seven layers of personhood, rooted in literature but extensible to life.

Authors: Amelie Rorty, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (March 2, 2016) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Literature | Arts, Psychology | Behavior

On December 18, 1988, twenty-five years after his writing had been denounced as “anti-Soviet” in his native Russia and mere months after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature “for an all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity,” prolific poet and essayist Joseph Brodsky (May 24, 1940–January 28, 1996) took the podium at Ann Arbor and addressed the graduating class at the University … [ Read more ]

Authors: Joseph Brodsky, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (December 18, 2013) | Subjects: Advice, Articles & Links, Excerpts, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Wisdom

When a society has shed its crutches of inequality in a relatively short period — from finally recognizing the dignity of all love with marriage equality to finally taking stock of a generations-old wound with Black Lives Matter — vast swaths of the population are perhaps bound to find the rate of change intolerable, bound to find themselves tossed into a brave new world that … [ Read more ]

Authors: H.L. Mencken, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (November 11, 2016) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Life & Society, Perception | Observation, Politics & Public Policy

Despite his enormous contributions to science, Albert Einstein was no reclusive genius, his ever-eager conversations and correspondence engaging such diverse partners as the Indian philosopher Tagore and a young South African girl who wanted to be a scientist. In 1931, the Institute for Intellectual Cooperation invited the renowned physicist to a cross-disciplinary exchange of ideas about politics and peace with a thinker of his choosing. … [ Read more ]

Authors: Albert Einstein, Maria Popova, Sigmund Freud | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (May 6, 2013) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Military | War | Peace, Psychology | Behavior, Sociology | Anthropology

In 1908, Indian revolutionary Taraknath Das wrote to Leo Tolstoy, by then one of the most famous public figures in the world, asking for the author’s support in India’s independence from British colonial rule. On December 14, Tolstoy, who had spent the last twenty years seeking the answers to life’s greatest moral questions, was moved to reply in a long letter, which Das published in … [ Read more ]

Author: Leo Tolstoy | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (August 21, 2014) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Freedom | Liberty, History, Life & Society, Love, Sociology | Anthropology

“What we regard as Evil is capable of a fairly ubiquitous presence if only because it tends to appear in the guise of good.”

Authors: Joseph Brodsky, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (October 25, 2016) | Subjects: Excerpts, Good & Evil, Insight, Life & Society, Sociology | Anthropology