#Amanda Palmer

Author: Maria Popova / Source: Brain Pickings “Mingle the starlight with your lives and you won’t be fretted by trifles,” the pioneering 19th-century astronomer Maria Mitchell, who paved the way for women in science, used to tell her Vassar students — America’s first class of women astronomers

Author: Maria Popova / Source: Brain Pickings “To sin by silence, when we should protest, makes cowards out of men,” the poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox wrote in her piercing and prescient 1914 anthem against silence. Half a century later, these words would come to embolden one of the most revolutionary

Author: Maria Popova / Source: Brain Pickings during what he knew would be his final year. For decades, he celebrated his dual love of chemistry and birthdays by acquiring a physical form of the chemical element with the periodic table number corresponding to the age he was turning that year. On

Author: Maria Popova / Source: Brain Pickings catalyzed the modern environmental movement with her epoch-making 1962 book Silent Spring. Carson — a biologist who never relinquished her first love of literature — launched a courageous crusade against the deadly impact of pesticides and DDT in

Author: Maria Popova / Source: Brain Pickings In contemplating the parallels between being an artist and being a parent, the psychologist turned pioneering sculptor Anne Truitt wrote of “an understanding deeper than my own of what it is to be human, and a mysterious revelation of a radiant