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The World-Changing Power of Wonder, Delight, and Play

By Steven Johnson — 2016

Sometime in the last decades of the 1700s, a Swiss inventor and showman with the delightful name John-Joseph Merlin opened an establishment in London called Merlin’s Mechanical Museum. In modern terms, Merlin’s shop was a kind of hybrid between a science museum, a gaming arcade, and a maker lab.

Read on medium.com

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May 20, 1990: Advice on Life and Creative Integrity from Calvin and Hobbes Creator Bill Watterson

On May 20, 1990, Bill Watterson, creator of the beloved Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, took the podium at Kenyon College — the same stage David Foster Wallace would occupy 15 years later to deliver his memorable commencement address — and gave the graduating class a gift of equally remarkable insight...

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Maria Popova and Bill Waterson
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Almost Nothing, Yet Everything: A Stunning Japanese Illustrated Poem Celebrating Water and the Wonder of Life

“If you turn your back to the blues and deny your dependence on them,” Ellen Meloy wrote in her timeless meditation on water as a portal to transcendence, “you might lose your place in the world, your actions would become small, your soul disengaged.”

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Maria Popova
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Diane Ackerman on the Evolutionary and Existential Purpose of Deep Play

“In rare moments of deep play, we can lay aside our sense of self, shed time’s continuum, ignore pain, and sit quietly in the absolute present, watching the world’s ordinary miracles.”

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Maria Popova
2016
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