This newsletter was sent to all of the subscribers on Jim’s list (2,912) on Friday, February 8, 2019. This week’s newsletter takes a short break from writers and writing (mostly) and explores a couple of other topics, such as post-prison rehabilitation and the interesting story of a 1960s folk music classic. But you can • Read More »
Tags: Bess Lomax Hawes, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Jacqueline Steiner, Kingston Trio, Maria Popova, MTA, Oscar Wilde, Pablo Casals
If you feel that you are piling up the birthdays and that you are “growing old” — a phrase that has become part of our natural conversation these days — consider the words of Pablo Casals, the famous cellist: On my last birthday I was ninety-three years old. That is not young, of course. In • Read More »
Tags: Maria Popova, Pablo Casals
All the world knows Beatrix Potter as the author of the Peter Rabbit stories. Some of the world knows that Potter also illustrated those stories. Probably even fewer people know that Potter was a scientist and a scientific artist, and her specialty was mushrooms. As Maria Popova of BrainPickings writes: . . . no aspect • Read More »
Tags: Anne Steven Hobbs, Beatrix Potter, BrainPickings.org, Linnean Society, Maria Popova, Peter Rabbit
Maria Popova, the brain behind BrainPickings.com — a newsletter you should subscribe to — has written another tribute to the ideas of the late science fiction novelist, Ursula Le Guin. Le Guin, as Popova points out, has important things to say about the function of storytelling. Here is part of it: “People wish to be • Read More »
Tags: art, BrainPickings.org, Maria Popova, storytelling, Talking on the Water, Ursula Le Guin, writing
Whatever she was, she had a special talent for keeping readers in her grip, for making them see what they had never seen before, and for making them think about what she had written long after they had finished reading.
Tags: BrainPickings.org, Julie Phillips, Maria Popova, New Yorker, No Time to Spare, On the Media, spare time, The Dispossessed, The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula Le Guin
Maria Popova, who produces the wonderful and stimulating BrainPickings.org website, has written a lengthy review of Dave Goulson’s book, A Sting in the Tale. The review is titled, A Brief History of How Bees Sexed Up Earth and Gave Flowers Their Colors, and subtitled, How a striped, winged, six-legged love machine sparked “the longest marketing campaign in history,” which should be enough to • Read More »
Tags: A Brief History of How Bees Sexed Up Earth and Gave Flowers Their Colors, A Sting in the Tale, bees, book review, books about bees, BrainPickings.org, Dave Goulson, E.O. Wilson, Maria Popova, sex and plants, species extinction