Reads tagged with “Figuring”

How Kepler Invented Science Fiction and Defended His Mother in a Witchcraft Trial While Revolutionizing Our Understanding of the Universe
How many revolutions does the cog of culture make before a new truth about reality catches into gear?

Trailblazing 19th-Century Astronomer Maria Mitchell on Social Change and the Life of the Mind
“Reformers are apt to forget… that the world is not made up entirely of the wicked and the hungry, there are persons hungry for the food of the mind, the wants of which are as imperious as those of the body.”

There Are Infinitely Many Kinds of Beautiful Lives: A Reading from “Figuring” Accompanied by Yo-Yo Ma, Benefitting Refugee Children
A reading from “Figuring” with original music by Yo-Yo Ma, a stunning rendition of the 19-century parlor song “Beautiful Dreamer” by Esperanza Spalding, and a family of friends speaking out against injustice in the universal language of sympathy.

Trailblazing Writer and Feminist Margaret Fuller on the Social Value of Intellectual Labor and Why Artists Ought to Be Paid
“The circulating medium… is abused like all good things, but without it you would not have had your Horace and Virgil.”

Killed by Kindness: Virginia Woolf, the Art of Letters, the Birth and Death of Photography, and the Fate of Every Technology
An elegy for the triumph of commodity over creativity.

The First Surviving Photograph of the Moon: John Adams Whipple and How the Birth of Astrophotography Bridged Impermanence and Immortality
A dual serenade to being and non-being, composed in glass, metal, and stardust.

Middle Age and the Art of Self-Renewal: An Extraordinary Letter from Pioneering Education Reformer Elizabeth Peabody
“The perilous time for the most highly gifted is not youth… The perilous season is middle age, when a false wisdom tempts them to doubt the divine origin of the dreams of their youth…”

The Conflicted Love Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller: How an Intense Unclassifiable Relationship Shaped the History of Modern Thought
We suffer by wanting different things often at odds with one another, but we suffer even more by wanting to want different things.

How to Save a World: Rachel Carson’s Advice to Posterity
“Mankind is challenged, as it has never been challenged before, to prove its maturity and its mastery — not of nature, but of itself.”

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