NOTE: This newsletter might be cut short by your email program. View it in full.

If a friend forwarded it to you and you'd like your very own newsletter, subscribe here — it's free.

Need to modify your subscription? You can change your email address or unsubscribe.

Hello Reader! This is the weekly email digest of the daily online journal Brain Pickings by Maria Popova. If you missed last week's edition — the radical act of letting things hurt and how (not) to help a friend in sorrow; the root of our strength in times of crisis; Whitman's ode to the equal dignity and interleaving of all life — you can catch up right here. And if you missed my annual selection of favorite books this year, those are here. If my labor of love enriches your life in any way, please consider supporting it with a donation – for fourteen years, I have spent tens of thousands of hours, made many personal sacrifices, and invested tremendous resources in Brain Pickings, which remains free and ad-free and alive thanks to reader patronage. If you already donate: THANK YOU.

The Best of Brain Pickings 2020

Like every year, this annual glance over the shoulder of time is a composite of the essays that most resonated with readers and those I most enjoyed writing, the overlap being always significant but always the Venn diagram of a partial eclipse rather than a perfect totality.

Even more so than other years, in this particularly trying year, it has been curious to observe the patterns that emerge across those ideas, themes, and regions of being that most sustain us in times of crisis: love, trees, poetry, creativity, the stubborn insistence on life in the face of loss, the constancy of nature’s consolations, the revivifying passion to go on making, go on loving, go on living.

Essential Life-Learnings from 14 Years of Brain Pickings

Antidotes to Fear of Death: Astrophysicist Janna Levin Reads Astronomer and Poet Rebecca Elson's Stunning Cosmic Salve for Our Creaturely Tremblings of Heart

Yes to Life, in Spite of Everything: Viktor Frankl's Lost Lectures on Moving Beyond Optimism and Pessimism to Find the Deepest Source of Meaning

Seasons in a Pandemic: Mary Shelley on What Makes Life Worth Living and Nature's Beauty as a Lifeline to Regaining Sanity

Creativity in the Time of COVID: Zadie Smith on Writing, Love, and What Echoes Through the Hallway of Time Suddenly Emptied of Habit

I Long to Read More in the Book of You: Moomins Creator Tove Jansson's Tender and Passionate Letters to the Love of Her Life

Bloom: A Touching Animated Short Film about Depression and What It Takes to Recover the Light of Being

The Cosmic Miracle of Trees: Astronaut Leland Melvin Reads Pablo Neruda's Love Letter to Earth's Forests

Standing on the Shoulders of Solitude: Newton, the Plague, and How Quarantine Fomented the Greatest Leap in Science

Nick Cave on Living with Loss and the Central Paradox of Grief as a Portal to Aliveness

Walt Whitman on What Makes a Great Person and What Wisdom Really Means

Singularity: Marie Howe's Ode to Stephen Hawking, Our Cosmic Belonging, and the Meaning of Home, in a Stunning Animated Short Film

The Radical Act of Letting Things Hurt: How (Not) to Help a Friend in Sorrow

Octavia Butler on How (Not) to Choose Our Leaders

The Spirit of the Woods: Poet and Painter Rebecca Hey's Gorgeous 19th-Century Illustrations for the World's First Encyclopedia of Trees

spiritofthewoods0.jpg?resize=600%2C315&ssl=1

What It Takes to Grow Up, What It Means to Have Grown

The Osbick Bird: Edward Gorey's Tender and Surprising Vintage Illustrated Allegory About the Meaning of True Love

A Lifeline for the Hour of Despair: James Baldwin on 4AM, the Fulcrum of Love, and Life as a Moral Obligation to the Universe

How an Artist is Like a Tree: Paul Klee on Creativity

How to Live and How to Die

Complement with the year’s most nourishing books.

donating=loving

In 2020, I spent thousands of hours and thousands of dollars keeping Brain Pickings going. For fourteen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor has enlarged and enriched your own life this year, please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference.

monthly donation You can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch.		one-time donation Or you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount.

Partial to Bitcoin? You can beam some bit-love my way: 197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7

A SMALL, DELIGHTFUL SIDE PROJECT:

Vintage Science Face Masks Benefiting the Nature Conservancy

You're receiving this email because you subscribed on Brain Pickings. This weekly newsletter comes out on Sundays and offers the week's most unmissable articles.

Brain Pickings

NOT A MAILING ADDRESS

159 Pioneer Street

Brooklyn, NY 11231

Add us to your address book

unsubscribe from this list update subscription preferences