Carte du Jour: Brain Pickings

…The wandering one couldn't decide which to post so settles for most of the week's as usual smashing newsletter, somewhat but not excessively trimmed. Still wondering why you haven't subscribed yet...don't count room service being a habit here when the internet is one big buffet...

An extraordinary love letter from Balzac, Susan Sontag on the commodification of wisdom, humanistic hope for the present from 1930, and more. Looking crappy? View here  If you missed last week's edition – Carl Sagan's reading list, Francis Bacon on studies, Vita Sackville-West's love letter to Virginia Woolf, and more – you can catch up right here.  Green Card Stories: A Visual Catalog of Immigrants' Triumphs and Tribulations Poignant portrait of a system caught between hope and despair. Having spent a good portion of my adult life wrangling the nine circles of my very own immigration hell, I feel a profound personal investment in the immigration debates that have swelled to particularly prodigious proportions around this year's election. Green Card Stories (public library) tells the heartening, and often dramatic, tales of fifty immigrants who recently attained their American residency or citizenship, accompanied by powerful profiles by journalist Saundra Amrhein and evocative portraits by documentary photographer Ariana Lindquist.

Credit Alchemy!

… or the Alchemical Roots of the Financial Revolution. Not just alike in opacity and aim (gold from base material whether metal or sweat), credit and alchemy are  more connected historically, than you might imagine. 

When the philosopher Baruch de Spinoza received word of a successful transmutation of lead into gold in December of 1666, he quickly sought to quell his skepticism by personally visiting the adept, and the visit left him fully convinced of the veracity of the adept’s account.

How to Think

…advice from Chris Hedges that many need but few recognize. That includes education systems, most ed theory wonks working for Foundations and government agencies…indeed society itself,

Cultures that endure carve out a protected space for those who question and challenge national myths. Artists, writers, poets, activists, journalists, philosophers, dancers, musicians, actors, directors and renegades must be tolerated if a culture is to be pulled back from disaster

Chris Hedges: How to Think - Chris Hedges' Columns - Truthdig