Enlarge (credit: Johner Images / Getty) A small independent bookstore filed a class-action lawsuit against Amazon last week, alleging that the e-commerce giant colluded with the five major book publishers to fix wholesale prices and block other sellers “from competing on price or product availability.” The suit seeks to compensate independent booksellers for Amazon’s and […]
“Everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves to tell what is inside themselves.” “You only are free when you realize you belong no place — you belong every place — no place at all,” Maya Angelou told Bill Moyers in their fantastic forgotten conversation about freedom. Beneath the surface of this paradoxical sentiment […]
Transcendence and tenderness in the lacuna of awe between the creaturely and the cosmic. In 1621, already questioning his life in the priesthood — the era’s safest and most reputable career for the educated — the 29-year-old Pierre Gassendi, a mathematical prodigy since childhood, traveled to the Arctic circle as he began diverting his passionate […]
“Here you may enter galactic memory, disguised as a whirlpool of sand, and discover you are pure event mixed with water, occurring in time and space, as sheep, a few goats, graze, keep watch nearby.” “Place and a mind may interpenetrate till the nature of both is altered,” the trailblazing Scottish mountaineer and poet Nan […]
On the lifelong art of feeling worthy of wanting and worthy of receiving. In his revelatory 1956 classic The Art of Loving, the humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm (March 23, 1900–March 18, 1980) dared defy millennia of cultural distortion, setting out to heal our most damaging inheritance from the Romantics and to correct Freud’s […]
Sylvan sublimity between the heavens and the deep blue sea. “After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on — have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear — what remains?” the aging Walt Whitman asked in his diary as he contemplated what makes life worth […]
“We are protected not so much by our own skin, but by what is beyond it. The boundaries between our bodies begin to dissolve here… Immunity… is a common trust as much as it is a private account.” Months after Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring awakened humanity to the delicate interdependence of nature, Dr. King awakened […]
How a forgotten visionary’s futuristic dream dared generations to reimagine the relationship between nature and human creativity. Nineteen years after the publication of Isaac Newton’s epoch-making Principia — in England, in Latin — the prodigy mathematician Émilie du Châtelet set out to translate his ideas into her native French, making them more comprehensible in the […]
“You cannot think simultaneously about listening to the waves and whether you are enjoying listening to the waves.” “Fearlessness is what love seeks,” Hannah Arendt wrote in her superb 1929 meditation on love and how to live with the fundamental fear of loss. “Such fearlessness exists only in the complete calm that can no longer […]
On where to seek refuge from the forethought of grief. Two hundred years ago, in a prophetic book envisioning a twenty-first-century world savaged by a deadly pandemic, Mary Shelley considered what makes life worth living, insisting that in the midst of widespread death and despair, we must seek peace in the “murmur of streams, and […]