Maria Popova at Marginalia:
At seventy-six, Hildegard of Bingen — poet, painter, healer, composer, philosopher, mystic, medical writer — has just finished writing and illustrating her third and farthest-seeing book: The Book of Divine Works, chronicling seven years of prophetic visions. God had first begun speaking to her in “the voice of the Living Light” when she was three, but she never suffered the hubris of a self-appointed prophet — rather, she considered herself “a totally uneducated human being,” a “wretched and fragile creature,” who is merely a channel for divine wisdom. She may be the Western world’s first great crusader against dualism — in the sermons she delivered to priests, bishops, abbots, and ordinary people all over present-day Germany and Switzerland, she preached that “God is Reason,” that “Reason is the root” from which “the resounding Word blooms,” but also that “from the heart comes healing,” that we apprehend the world and its wisdom most clearly through the intuitions of the “inner eye” and “inner ear.”
Hildegard was fifty-six when she began receiving the vision that would become her Book of Divine Works. On its pages, between writings about birds and trees and stones and stars, between reckonings with the nature of eternity and the fundaments of love, she conceptualizes something the word for which would not be coined for another seven centuries: ecology.
more here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
When Dr. Nir Barzilai met the 100-year-old Helen Reichert, she was smoking a cigarette. Dr. Barzilai, the director of the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, recalled Mrs. Reichert saying that doctors had repeatedly told her to quit. But those doctors had all died, Mrs. Reichert noted, and she hadn’t. Mrs. Reichert lived almost another decade before passing away in 2011.
I
The unending wars and fortified borders fracturing much of the world have created lucrative testing grounds for the private firms tinkering with defense and security technologies. Venture capitalists scrolling through pitch decks of products seemingly lifted from blockbuster thrillers are rapidly cashing in. According to a Dealroom 
Everyone has heard that it’s vital to get seven to nine hours of sleep a night, a recommendation repeated so often it has become gospel. Get anything less, and you are more likely to suffer from poor health in the short and long term—memory problems, metabolic issues, depression, dementia, heart disease, a weakened immune system.
The scariest thing about contemporary American politics is that on January 7, 2021, it was widely acknowledged among American conservatives that Donald Trump’s behavior on January 6th was completely unacceptable.
Not infrequently,
Over the past two decades, research has emerged showing that opportunities for risky play are crucial for healthy physical, 
When, on January 19, 1939, W.H. Auden boarded at Southampton a ship bound for New York City, he could not have known that he would never live in England again. But some months earlier, he had told his friend Christopher Isherwood that he wanted to settle permanently in the United States. Almost as soon as he arrived in New York, he began to rethink his calling as a poet, and, moreover, to reconsider the social role and function of poetry. (He also began a spiritual pilgrimage that would lead him to embrace the Christian faith of his childhood.)
To seek out a therapeutic practice, we are sometimes told, is often the expression of a desire for change. But ‘therapy’ is hardly separate from the culture it intersects with, and may end up changing that very culture. If the poet W. H. Auden could describe Freud as ‘no more a person / now but a whole climate of opinion’, then surely that was because Freud’s language eventually became our own; phrases like ‘acting defensively’ or ‘feeling conflicted’, as John Forrester notes, have been absorbed into everyday speech. A particular therapeutic practice can thereby help to bring into being the self it seeks to describe (such as the epochal emergence of what Philip Rieff once called ‘psychological man’), as its models of successful treatment and its language for the mind, emotions, and behaviour become part of culture’s common-sense. Even the use of ‘therapy’ tells us something about its contemporary cultural status, indexing far more than any individual therapeutic act. ‘You should talk to a therapist’ is a refrain regularly printed on t-shirts, worn by internet celebrities of all stripes, and the remark trades off the sense that recommending therapy could be seen as an act of care just as it could also be a moral corrective for bad behaviour (‘go to therapy, you naughty boy!’).
In 2009, The New York Observer published “
Watching television while using another smart device is so common that over 
Yascha Mounk: One of the things that I’ve really been trying to wrap my head around is the impact of AI. The launch of easily publicly accessible AI was now a little over two years ago, and it is clear that AI has tremendous capacities. At the same time, so far, its impact on the world has been a little bit more limited than might have been imagined two years ago. How do you see this panning out over the course of the next few years?