Follow Friday: Brain Pickings

It is Follow Friday! This is a blogging meme in which authors recommend other blogs, websites, repositories, or anything else. In keeping with the theme of this blog, I will spotlight different resources for professional and aspiring professional genealogists each week: not only genealogy-related, but also others of interest.

I did not want to do this. Really? Two “brain-related” blogs in back-to-back weeks?

But Brain Pickings has been so great since I started reading it 2-3 weeks ago, that I simply had to recommend the site. Unlike Litemind (reviewed last week), Brain Pickings does not offer practical advice on how to increase your mental prowess or your problem-solving abilities. Instead, BP simply addresses Thought and the Mind in a general sense and in their manifestations through other’s work.

The author, Maria Popova (who also writes for Wired and The Atlantic), describes BP thus:

Brain Pickings is a discovery engine for interestingness, culling and curating cross-disciplinary curiosity-quenchers, and separating the signal from the noise to bring you things you didn’t know you were interested in until you are.[1]

Some of the recent posts that forced me to mention this blog are:

• “Monoculture: How Our Era’s Dominant Story Shapes Our Lives” This post discusses how each historic era has an overriding philosophy that informs most aspects of that era’s cultures.
• “Computational Linguistics: What Our Word Choice Reveals About Us” This post discusses just how revealing the use of pronouns actually is.
• “Metropopular: If Cities Could Speak” Great animated clip of anthropomorphized cities with the “personalities” that we generally associate with those cities.
• “Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns for the Information Age” Amazing and beautiful examples of infographics and visualizing data.

And these are only a few of the posts that Maria has published in the past three days! Go back a few weeks and you will see why I simply had to recommend this blog.