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Brain Pickings is about picking culture’s collective brain for tidbits of stuff that inspires, revolutionizes, or simply makes us think. It’s about innovation and authenticity and all those other things that have become fluff phrases but don’t have to be.

And despite the occasional indulgence in pure laugh-and-point value or aesthetic pleasure, it’s about concepts, technologies, art, design, movements, stats (yes, stats), visonaries, ideologies and anything else to keep an eye on because we think it’s important. Important not because it is (or will be) in the news, or because it’s hot with the hipster set, or because it’s merely entertaining, but because it is (or will be) driving culture and shaping, in one way or another, our future.

Oh, and let’s not forget taking it all too seriously can damage your hair. So we approach it all with a healthy dose of snark. Because we really don’t like bad hair.