There's a particularly sharp one about Jerry Seinfeld and how making people laugh was more important to him than any form of message and a very touchi Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus. Emerson, it seemed to me, emphasized the vital things about spirituality, while discarding all its outworn trappings.

A phenomenal master class shaped by Lopate’s informative, accessible tone, and immense gift for storytelling. It is, in the words of David Foster Wallace, a dialogue between consciousnesses in the purest sense of the term. While we all wonder how our lives might have been, what if you had the chance to go to the library and see for yourself? It’s his insatiable curiosity, his willingness to drill down into every single minute detail of his subject.

Emerson’s self-reliance reads as self-absorption in certain passages, and self-absorption being the keynote of our culture for some decades now, it’s clear how such thinking can hinder progress and cause all kinds of disastrous inequality. Drawing on ancient Stoic wisdom and examples across history and around the world, Ryan Holiday shows why courage is so important, and how to cultivate it in our own lives. If I could go back, I’d cut out most of the film stuff and take a bunch of liberal arts classes instead: history and literature and economics and sociology. Then to read your exact thoughts on the page from an author who perhaps lived centuries ago… it reminds us of this shared thread of humanity that runs through everyone existing in this world.

Distinguished author Phillip Lopate, editor of the celebrated anthology The Art of the Personal Essay, is universally acclaimed as “one of our best personal essayists” ( Dallas Morning News).Aside from the writing on Yeats (and this book is worth reading just for that, really) I found the essay on public benches/public spaces incredibly interesting and I could never have dreamed I would be interested in urban planning. A book can “become noxious” when it’s treated as gospel, when “colleges are built on it” and other books are written about it by those “who set out from accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of principles. The repetitious paragraph-style quotes severly break the flow of an otherwise interesting argument in nearly every chapter.

I've never felt so right, so welcomed and capable than after reading this first essay and I really want everyone to enjoy something similarly. Communication was excellent I had some questions because I was unable to track the package until it hit US soil. Puschak shrewdly uses it as a counterpoint to his other essay The Comforts of Cyberpunk, which is about letting go of these feeling of powerlessness about the state of the world and embracing the comforting idea that you only have to take care of yourself in a world that is wildly out of control. The show celebrates design and architecture in all of its functional glory and accidental absurdity, with intriguing tales of both designers and the people impacted by their designs. Now, in his debut essay collection, “Escape Into Meaning,” he attempts to translate his signature style into the written word.This is the exact opposite of Tolkien's LOTR Middle Earth where everything has a profound meaning and purpose - including a simple hobbit. Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? The point of school was to get good grades, and the point of good grades was to get into a good college, and the point of a good college was to get a good job, and the point of a good job was some or maybe all of the following: (a) to make money; (b) to be happy; (c) to be independent and not live at home; (d) to seem desirable to potential romantic partners; (e) to not be the type of person your parents are embarrassed by when they’re at a dinner party and everyone is talking about their kids.

We’ll explore Lewis’s thoughts on everything from friendships to heaven, from the reasons for faith to the power of stories. When I finally crossed the college checkpoint and arrived at Boston University in 2006, a school perfectly “good enough” for my parents, I was a deeply uninspired person, trained to view education as a game, not a source of joy or fulfillment. Certainly worth reading if you enjoy essay collections, consume a lot of books, and need something new, and with moderate expectations, it’ll be a nice relaxing time. Her mother’s dream was for her only daughter to become a star, and Jennette would do anything to make her mother happy. Everything I’ve written since that afternoon in Kenmore, including this book, I owe to his inspiration.I’ve been watching his videos on YouTube for the past 7 years (at least) so it made me happy that he published a full book. But Jonathan Gottschall, an expert on the science of stories, argues that there is a dark side to storytelling we can no longer ignore. The Hidden Habits of Genius explores the meaning of this contested term, and the unexpected motivations of those we have dubbed "genius" throughout history, from Charles Darwin and Marie Curie to Leonardo Da Vinci and Andy Warhol to Toni Morrison and Elon Musk. So many of my professors at BU were obsessed with their subjects, and that enthusiasm was infectious. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.