Brain Pickings

Toni Morrison once lamented that people have been taught to think of a book as a mirror, when it ought to be a door. All great storytelling — be it a novel or a poem, a film or a song — enchants us precisely because it swings open the door to a wo...

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 ...

At the hazy dawn of the twentieth century, through the byways of mental meandering and mathematical play, Albert Einstein arrived at a revelation about the nature of the universe while working as a clerk at the Swiss patent office — a new relationship between space and time, the warp and weft of a single fabric that hammocks energy and matter into the lucid dream of reality. ...

To be a true person is to be entirely oneself in every circumstance, with all the courage and vulnerability this requires. And yet because a person is a confederacy of parts often at odds and sometimes at war with...

Friendship is the sunshine of life — the quiet radiance that makes our lives not only livable but worth living. (T...