George Eliot on Friendship

If Mona Lisa is the smile, Madame Cézanne is the scowl. Hortense Fiquet, Paul Cézanne’s model turned mistress turned mother of his child turned metaphorical millstone around his neck, endures as a standard art history punch line—the muse whose misery won immortality through the many masterpiece portraits done of her. Or at least that’s how the joke usually goes. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s current exhibition Madame Cézanne, which gathers together 24 of the 29 known portraits Cézanne painted of Hortense over a period of more than 20 years, tries to rewrite that joke as it hopes to solve the riddle of Madame Cézanne, aka, The Case of the Miserable Muse.

“One couldn’t carry on life comfortably without a little blindness to the fact that everything has been said better than we can put it ourselves.” – George Eliot

From Apple to Airbnb to OpenAI the generalist mindset has been an invaluable source of advantage — and we can all learn from these successes.

Philosopher Meghan Sullivan challenges the idea that religious texts can’t be taken seriously in modern philosophy. She explains how parables, scripture, and debate have always been connected to asking life’s biggest questions:

Will we build a successor collider to the LHC? Someday, we’ll reach the true limit of what experiments can probe. But that won’t be the end.