Asceticism is a practice with a long history the world over. Typically, the practice consists of some form of abstinence, frugality, and retreat—or a combination of all three—for a specific spiritual purpose. Some ascetics pursue redemption, others seek communion with their deity of choice, and still others remove themselves from the distractions of the world to discover an ephemeral thing… Read more →
One easy-to-find nugget of wisdom making the rounds on the Internet these days reads: “The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.” ― Aristotle But while the words make for an insightful expression, they do not, in fact, belong to Aristotle. They rightfully belong to the historian William James Durant, having… Read more →
I nearly drowned when I was eight years old. It happened during a weekend sailing trip at a lake in a remote state park in Iowa. Too young and too inexperienced to aid in the operation of the 18-foot sailboat, I had seated myself at the bow while my father and brother took charge. It was an unfamiliar boat, a… Read more →
On January 20th, 1600 Giordano Bruno, an Italian cosmologist and mathematician, was declared a heretic and sentenced to death. He was to be stripped, gagged to prevent “wicked words” from escaping his mouth, hung upside down, and burned at the stake. Far from being cowed, Bruno showed nothing but contempt for those who sat in judgment of him. “Perhaps you… Read more →
Several years after his death in 1947, the autobiography of Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist Max Planck was published. Entitled Scientific Autobiography and other papers, the posthumously released account of Planck’s life revealed his work’s philosophical underpinnings, his thoughts on ethics and morals, and other fascinating insights into his singular mind. Among these, a formulation that came to be known as… Read more →
In an article published September 13, 2019 on ESPN.com, international sports writer Aishwarya Kumar detailed an intriguing fact from the world of high-level chess: during competition, players were burning tremendous levels of calories and routinely losing weight. Strange as it may seem (since it appears for all observers to be a relatively sedentary endeavor) the physiological response to chess tournament… Read more →
In 1921 the psychologist Wolfgang Köhler published Intelligenzprüfungen an Menschenaffen (The Mentality of Apes), a book summarizing his work studying intelligent behavior in anthropoid apes. It was an important milestone in the field of comparative psychology, and the book helped establish Köhler as among the most influential psychologists of his day. The studies he conducted were designed to answer whether… Read more →
In his fable entitled The Grasshopper and the Ants, the Greek fabulist Aesop relates the story of a grasshopper who comes upon some ants. The ants are preparing grain they had collected to keep them through the winter. The grasshopper, starving, begs the ants for some food. When the ants wonder why the grasshopper has no food of his own,… Read more →
In 2014, a long forgotten essay written by the prolific science fiction writer Isaac Asimov was published by MIT Technology Review. Originally written in 1959, the essay entitled Isaac Asimov Asks, “How Do People Get New Ideas?” presents the author’s thoughts on the creative act and makes suggestions as to how creativity might be encouraged. Asimov was uniquely qualified to… Read more →
When the Roman nobleman Cassius attempts to persuade Brutus to join the conspiracy against Caesar in Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, he does so by including a rejection of divine predetermination: “Men at some time are masters of their fates: The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves…” — The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, Act… Read more →