The poet’s muse

“…Whitman placed Fanny Wright alongside Thomas Paine as the two most unjustly vilified figures in the convention-bound collective memory we call history. Freedom of thought was what Walt Whitman wanted, and Fanny Wright armed him with the arsenal of self-permission to pursue it, to go where she herself had gone while still in adolescence. On the pages of her precocious book that so impressed itself upon Whitman’s imagination, Fanny Wright had stepped into and beyond deism to argue—to demonstrate with reason—that the religious notion of an afterlife is a romance of mythology for which there is no physical evidence; that it is therefore far less compelling and interesting than the romance of reality, in which matter itself is in a sense immortal, since atoms undergo a continual reconfiguration from one thing to another. Without her early and lasting imprint on his cosmogony, Whitman might never have written that “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”” — Traversal by Maria Popova https://a.co/0bUKGTBg

Lucky us

Maria Popova echoes Richard Dawkins: “Someday this constellation I love will grow dim, then disband into atoms, and so will this constellation I am. “To die is different from what any one supposed,” Whitman wrote, “and luckier.” The poet who knew the amplitude of time knew too that death betokens the luckiness of having lived—the roll of the dice on the granite floor of eternity that configures each improbable existence, each I drawn from the myriad possible not-I’s that were never born and will never get to die. Everything we know of mathematics tells us that this infinite set of possible unconstellated atoms contains poets greater than Walt Whitman, chemists greater than Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, versions of you and me kinder and crueler than we will ever be. And yet here we are, between the dice, between the trees—probable impossibilities, each of us a brief traversal between not yet and never again, having only these arms to hold the borrowed atoms that we love. That is enough.” — Traversal by Maria Popova https://a.co/09v7APU0

Stupefied

We forget that none of this had to exist — that we weren’t owed mountains and music by the universe. And maybe we have to forget — or we would be too stupefied with gratitude for every raindrop and every eyelash to get through the daily tasks punctuating the unbidden wonder of our lives. But it is good, every once in a while, to let ourselves be stupefied by gratitude, to cast upon ourselves a spell against indifference: https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/12/12/thank-you-everything-icinori/

Thinketh again

… The “good” side of his thought ledger seems to contain such stereotypically manly virtues as power and certainty and control. Every man, he writes, must “manfully control his thoughts. … Doubts and fears should be rigorously excluded.” (It’s a little like “The Secret,” but for men.) With total confidence, Allen swaggers right into some very ugly ideas. “The truth is that oppressor and slave are cooperators in ignorance,” he writes, “and, while seeming to afflict each other, are in reality afflicting themselves.” I shivered in recognition — it’s the kind of pseudo-intellectual rationalization of evil you can still find all over modern social media…

What I discovered, in my brief experiment in thinkething, is that, in the absence of clear definitions of “good” and “bad,” it is easy to prune the garden of your thoughts into self-serving shapes. But I believe we have some responsibility to make our thoughts correspond to reality — not just to expect reality to swing its huge weight around, magically, to align with our thoughts. This is especially true now, in the vortex of chaos we call 2026. Maybe this will sound like bragging, but I would rather be unhappy and weak and full of self-doubt than dishonest and cruel and puffed up with false certainty. If I ever write a self-help book, I think I will call it “As a Man Muddles Through the Disappointing Confusion of True Self-Knowledge.” Maybe, a hundred years from now, it could be a best seller, too.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/magazine/man-thinketh-book.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

A Defense of a Liberal Arts Education in the Age of A.I. -

Making the case for a “useless” education

...I think the proof is always in the student. But you also have to recognize that there is an ineliminable element of human freedom in education.

When we talk about teaching and learning, the learning has to come from the student. And a good teacher who has a good pedagogy is always going to be especially attuned to the student and what the student needs and how to draw out of the student the best that that student can achieve.

But you cannot — trust me, any educator will tell you this — you cannot force the student. You can incentivize. We do that through grades and credentials. But ultimately, they have to want that sort of self-cultivation...

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/21/opinion/ai-liberal-arts-education.html?smid=em-share

Watterson’s commencement

"The truth is, most of us discover where we are headed when we arrive." On May 20 1990, Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson delivered his magnificent commencement address about the creative life. https://www.themarginalian.org/2013/05/20/bill-watterson-1990-kenyon-speech/

Our national safety valve

Or it used to be.

Ken Burns’ Baseball, 2d inning

Scott Simon at Parnassus

“Dogs are a very important part…” https://www.threads.com/@nprscottsimon/post/DYXJaSAibyP?xmt=AQG0O2KB81VYNV6qh1QFy6RRHxTU_seFn1kv06FijwxiHKWuPFo4svJhvdkF-kb9JR_fUOwM&slof=1

The Nobel-Winning Psychologist Who Believed He Found the Secret to Happiness

James said it first.

“My father simplified his life in terms of his daily habits,” Katherine wrote, “thus eliminating the need to make little decisions about everything.” By taking the small decisions off his plate, that simplification freed his attention for the people and work that actually mattered to him...

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/12/opinion/decision-making-herbert-simon.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

Colbert

Today is the birthday of satirist and TV host Stephen Colbert (books by this author), born in Washington, D.C. (1964). The youngest of 11 kids, Colbert lost his father and two of his brothers in a plane crash when he, Colbert, was 10 years old. He retreated into books and, later, the theater. He wasn’t particularly political until he joined the cast of The Daily Show in 1997. Colbert hosted his own political satire show, The Colbert Report, for more than nine years. He played the part of a conservative pundit on the show, a persona he describes as a “well-intentioned, poorly informed, high-status idiot” …in a commencement address to graduates of Knox College, he said: “Don’t be afraid to be a fool. Remember, you cannot be both young and wise. Young people who pretend to be wise to the ways of the world are mostly just cynics. Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it.”

https://www.garrisonkeillor.com/radio/the-writers-almanac-for-wednesday-may-13-2026/