Magazine Posts

"In early 2015, the 10,000-entry Oxford children’s dictionary dropped around fifty words related to nature — words like fern, willow, and starling — in favor of terms like broadband and cut and paste, some of the world’s most prominent authors composed an open letter of protest and alarm at this impoverishment of children’s vocabulary and its consequent diminishment of children’s belonging to and with the natural world. Among them was one of the great nature writers of our time: Robert Macfarlane....Troubled by this loss of vital and vitalizing language, MacFarlane teamed up with illustrator and children’s book author Jackie Morris, who had reached out to him to write an introduction for a sort of “wild dictionary” she wanted to create as a counterpoint to Oxford’s erasure. Instead, Macfarlane envisioned something greater. The Lost Words: A Spell Book (public library) was born" . Read more at the Marginalian

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (1821 – 1881), sometimes transliterated as Dostoyevsky, was a Russian novelist, short story writer, essayist and journalist. He is regarded by many literary critics as one of the greatest novelists in all of world literature, as many of his works are considered highly influential masterpieces. His most acclaimed novels include Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons (1872), and The Brothers Karamazov

"Language is an instrument of great precision and poignancy — our best tool for telling each other what the world is and what we are, for conveying the blueness of blue and the wonder of being alive. But it is also a thing of great pliancy and creativity — a living reminder that how we name things changes what we see, changes the seer" .....Read more at the Marginalian

"A symbolic moment of peace, grace, and humility amidst one of humanity’s most violent and disgraceful events".
"In December of 1914, a series of grassroots, unofficial ceasefires took hold of the Western Front in the heat of WWI. On Christmas, soldiers from an estimated 100,000 British and German troops began to exchange seasonal greetings and sing songs across the trenches",........ Continue Reading

"To look back on a year of reading is to be handed a clear mirror of your priorities and passions, of the questions that live in you and the reckonings that keep you up at night. While the literature of the present comprises only a tiny fraction of my own reading, here are a handful of books published this year that moved me with their tendrils of timelessness, with their questions and their consolations — selections neither exhaustive nor universal, as subjective as a shade of blue". Read more at the Marginalian

"A human being is a living constellation of contradictions, mostly opaque to itself. “Inward secret creatures,” Iris Murdoch called us in reckoning with the blind spots of our self-knowledge"... More at The Marginalian ➜

Baltasar Gracián, S. J. (1601 - 1658), in full, Baltasar Gracián Morales, was a Spanish Jesuit, prose writer and philosopher. He is known as  one of the leading exponents of conceptism, a literary movement of the Spanish Golden Age of literature characterized by a rapid rhythm, directness, simple vocabulary, witty metaphors, and wordplay. In this style, multiple meanings are conveyed in a very concise manner, and conceptual intricacies are emphasized over elaborate vocabulary. His writings were lauded by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and the appeal of his timeless advice focusing on honesty and kindness endures to this date.

André Paul Guillaume Gide (1869 - 1951)  French author known for his fiction as well as his autobiographical works. He authored more than fifty books and he was the winner of the 1947 Nobel Prize in Literature. Gide was brought up in isolated conditions in Normandy and became a prolific writer at an early age. He published his first novel, "The Notebooks of André Walter" (French: Les Cahiers d'André Walter) at the age of twenty-one.

Aristotle (Aristotélēs, pronounced (aristotélɛːs) (384–322 BC) was an Ancient Greek philosopher and polymath. One of the greatest intellectual figures of Western history. He was the author of a philosophical and scientific system that became the framework and vehicle for both Christian Scholasticism and medieval Islamic philosophy. Aristotle’s intellectual range was vast, covering most of the sciences and many of the arts. Aristotelian concepts remain embedded in Western thinking. More

Jorge Luis Borges'  (August 24, 1899–June 14, 1986) in “Borges and I” — his classic parable of selfhood, exploring the divide between private person and public persona that each of us must live with and live into. It appears in Labyrinths (public library) — a collection of Borges’s stories, essays, parables, and other writings, originally published in 1962  More at The Marginalian ➜ 

Abraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809 - April 15, 1865)

Edward R. Murrow (1908 – 1965) was an American broadcast journalist and war correspondent. He first gained prominence during World War II with a series of live radio broadcasts from Europe. Murrow was co-producer of "Hear It Now", an authoritative hour-long, radio weekly news digest. He moved on to television with, "See It Now" series, which helped lead to the censure of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Murrow is considered one of journalism's greatest figures. 
Quote source: Edward Murrow's last public speech in October 1964, receiving a "Family of Man" Humanity award