Love after life: Physicist Richard Feynman's stunning love letter to his dead wife, and more

Nobel-winning physicist Richard Feynman's stunning love letter to his dead wife, the remarkable life and illustrated recipes of the forgotten pioneer who paved the way for women in design and publishing, and more. NOTE: This message might be cut short by your email program. [View it in full](. If a friend forwarded it to you and you'd like your very own newsletter, [subscribe here]( – it's free. donating = loving I pour tremendous time, thought, love, and resources into Brain Pickings, which remains free. If you find any joy and stimulation here, please consider supporting my labor of love with a recurring monthly [donation]( of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner: [Subscribe]( You can also become a one-time patron with a single donation in any amount: [Donate]( And if you've already donated, from the bottom of my heart: THANK YOU. If you wish to cancel your recurring donation, you can do so [here](. 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[Love After Life: Nobel-Winning Physicist Richard Feynman’s Extraordinary Letter to His Departed Wife]( Few people have enchanted the popular imagination with science more powerfully and lastingly than physicist Richard Feynman (May 11, 1918–February 15, 1988) — the “Great Explainer” with the uncommon gift for bridging the essence of science with the most human and humane dimensions of life. Several months after Feynman’s death, while working on what would become [Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman]( ([public library]( — the masterly biography plumbing [the wellspring of Feynman’s genius]( — James Gleick discovered something of arresting strangeness and splendor. “My heart stopped,” Gleick tells me. “I have never had an experience like that as a biographer, before or since.” In a mass of unread papers sent to him by Feynman’s widow, Gweneth, Gleick found a letter that discomposed his most central understanding of Feynman’s character. A generation after computing pioneer Alan Turing [tussled with the binary code of body and spirit in the wake of loss]( Feynman — a scientist perhaps [uncommonly romantic]( yet resolutely rational and unsentimental in his reverence for the indomitable laws of physics that tend toward decay — penned a remarkable letter to a physical nonentity that was, for the future Nobel-winning physicist, the locus of an irrepressible metaphysical reality. Richard Feynman as a youth In high school, the teenage Richard spent summers at the beach in his native Far Rockaway. There, he grew besotted with a striking girl named Arline — a girl he knew he would marry. Both complement and counterpoint to his own nature, Arline met Richard’s inclination for science with ardor for philosophy and art. (The art class he took just to be near her would lay the foundation for his [little-known, lifelong passion for drawing]( By his junior year, Richard proposed. Arline accepted. With the eyes of young love, they peered into a shared future of infinite possibility for bliss. Richard and Arline, 1940s But they were abruptly grounded when a mysterious malady began afflicting Arline with inexplicable symptoms — a lump would appear and disappear on her neck, fevers would roil over her with no apparent cause. Eventually, she was hospitalized for what was believed to be typhoid. Gleick writes: Feynman began to glimpse the special powerlessness that medical uncertainty can inflict on a scientific person. He had come to believe that the scientific way of thinking brought a measure of calmness and control in difficult situations — but not now. Just as Feynman began bombarding the doctors with questions that steered them toward a closer approximation of the scientific method, Arline began to recover just as mysteriously and unpredictably as she had fallen ill. But the respite was only temporary. The symptoms returned, still shorn of a concrete explanation but now unambiguously pointing toward the terminal — a prognosis Arline’s doctors kept from her. Richard refused to go along with the deception — he and Arline had promised each other to face life with unremitting truthfulness — but he was forced to calibrate his commitment to circumstance. Gleick writes: His parents, Arline’s parents, and the doctors all urged him not to be so cruel as to tell a young woman she was dying. His sister, Joan, sobbing, told him he was stubborn and heartless. He broke down and bowed to tradition. In her room at Farmingdale Hospital, with her parents at her side, he confirmed that she had glandular fever. Meanwhile, he started carrying around a letter — a “goodbye love letter,” as he called it—that he planned to give her when she discovered the truth. He was sure she would never forgive the unforgivable lie. He did not have long to wait. Soon after Arline returned home from the hospital she crept to the top of the stairs and overheard her mother weeping with a neighbor down in the kitchen. When she confronted Richard — his letter snug in his pocket — he told her the truth, handed her the letter, and asked her to marry him. Arline and Richard, 1940s Marriage, however, proved to be a towering practical problem — Princeton, where Feynman was now pursuing a Ph.D., threatened to withdraw the fellowships funding his graduate studies if he were to wed, for the university considered the emotional and pragmatic responsibilities of marriage a grave threat to academic discipline. Just as Feynman began considering leaving Princeton, a diagnosis detonated the situation — Arline had contracted a rare form of tuberculosis, most likely from unpasteurized milk. At first, Feynman was relieved that the grim alternative options of Hodgkin’s disease and incurable cancers like lymphoma had been ruled out. But he was underestimating, or perhaps misunderstanding, the gravity of tuberculosis — the very disease which had [taken the love of Alan Turing’s life]( and which, during its two-century heyday, had claimed more lives around the globe than any other malady and all wars combined. At the time of Arline’s diagnosis in 1941, immunology was in its infancy, the antibiotic treatment of bacterial infections practically nonexistent, and the first successful medical application of penicillin a year away. Tuberculosis was a death sentence, even if it was a slow death with intervals of remission — a fact Richard and Arline faced with an ambivalent mix of brave lucidity and hope against hope. Meanwhile, Richard’s parents met the prospect of his marriage with bristling dread. His mother, who believed he was marrying Arline out of pity rather than love, admonished him that he would be putting his health and his very life in danger, and coldly worried about how the stigma attached to tuberculosis would impact her brilliant young son’s reputation. “I was surprised to learn such a marriage is not unlawful,” she scoffed unfeelingly. “It ought to be.” But Richard was buoyed by love — a love so large and luminous that he found himself singing aloud one day as he was arranging Arline’s transfer to a sanatorium. Determined to go through with the wedding, he wrote to his beloved: I guess maybe it is like rolling off of a log — my heart is filled again & I’m choked with emotions — and love is so good & powerful — it’s worth preserving — I know nothing can separate us — we’ve stood the tests of time and our love is as glorious now as the day it was born — dearest riches have never made people great but love does it every day — we’re not little people — we’re giants … I know we both have a future ahead of us — with a world of happiness — now & forever. On June 29, 1942, they promised each other eternity. Richard and Arline on their wedding day Gleick writes: He borrowed a station wagon from a Princeton friend, outfitted it with mattresses for the journey, and picked up Arline in Cedarhurst. She walked down her father’s hand-poured concrete driveway wearing a white dress. They crossed New York Harbor on the Staten Island ferry — their honeymoon ship. They married in a city office on Staten Island, in the presence of neither family nor friends, their only witnesses two strangers called in from the next room. Fearful of contagion, Richard did not kiss her on the lips. After the ceremony he helped her slowly down the stairs, and onward they drove to Arline’s new home, a charity hospital in Browns Mills, New Jersey. Meanwhile, WWII was reaching its crescendo of destruction, dragging America into the belly of death with the attack on Pearl Harbor. Now one of the nation’s most promising physicists, Feynman was recruited to work on what would become [the Manhattan Project]( and soon joined the secret laboratory in Los Alamos. Feynman’s Los Alamos badge Arline entered the nearby Albuquerque sanatorium, from where she wrote him letters in code — for the sheer fun of it, because she knew how he cherished puzzles, but the correspondence alarmed the military censors at the laboratory’s Intelligence Office. Tasked with abating any breaches to the secrecy of the operation, they cautioned Feynman that coded messages were against the rules and demanded that his wife include a key in each letter to help them decipher it. This only amplified Arline’s sense of fun — she began cutting holes into her letters, covering passages with ink, and even mail-ordered a jigsaw puzzle kit with which to cut up the pages and completely confound the agents. But the levity masked the underlying darkness which Richard and Arline tried so desperately to evade — Arline was dying. As her body failed, he steadied himself to her spirit: You are a strong and beautiful woman. You are not always as strong as other times but it rises & falls like the flow of a mountain stream. I feel I am a reservoir for your strength — without you I would be empty and weak… I find it much harder these days to write these things to you. In every single letter, he told her that he loved her. “I have a serious affliction: loving you forever,” he wrote. Richard and Arline at the Albuquerque sanatorium In early 1945, two and a half years into their marriage, Richard and Arline made love for the first time. He had been too afraid of harming her frail health somehow, she too afraid of infecting him with the deadly bacterium consuming her. But Arline insisted that this pent up desire could no longer be contained and assured Richard that this would only bring them closer — to each other, and to the life they had so lovingly dreamt up for themselves: I’ll always be your sweetheart & first love — besides a devoted wife — we’ll be proud parents too… I am proud of you always Richard –[you are] a good husband, and lover, & well, coach, I’ll show you what I mean Sunday. But heightened as their hopes were by this new dimension of shared experience, Arline’s health continued to plummet. Her weight dropped to eighty-four pounds. Exasperated by the helplessness of medicine, which Feynman had come to see not as a manifestation but as a mutilation of the scientific method, he invested all hope in an experimental drug made of mold growths. “Keep hanging on,” he exhorted Arline. “Nothing is certain. We lead a charmed life.” She began spitting blood. At twenty-seven, on the precipice of a brilliant scientific career, he was terminally in love. On June 16, 1945, while working at the computing room at Los Alamos, Feynman received a call from the sanatorium that Arline was dying. He borrowed a colleague’s car and sped to the hospital, where he found her immobile, her eyes barely tracing his movement. Early in his scientific career, he had been animated by the nature of time. Now, hours stretched and contracted as he sat at her deathbed, until one last small breath tolled the end at 9:21PM. The wake of loss has a way of tranquilizing grief with the pressing demands of practical arrangements — a tranquilizer we take willingly, almost gratefully. The following morning, Feynman arranged for his beloved’s cremation, methodically collected her personal belongings, and on the final page of the small spiral notebook in which she recorded her symptoms he wrote with scientific remove: “June 16 — Death.” And so we arrive at Gleick’s improbable discovery in that box of letters — improbable because of the extreme rationality with which Feynman hedged against even the slightest intimation of metaphysical conjectures untestable by science and unprovable by reason. During his courtship of Arline, he had been vexed by her enthusiasm for Descartes, whose “proof” of God’s perfection he found intellectually lazy and unbefitting of Descartes’s reputation as [a champion of reason](. He had impishly countered Arline’s insistence that there are two sides to everything by cutting a piece of paper and half-twisting it into a Möbius strip, the ends pasted together to render a surface with just one side. Everything that appeared mystical, Feynman believed, was simply an insufficiently explained mystery with a physical answer not yet found. Even Arline’s dying hour had offered testing ground for conviction. Puzzlingly, the clock in the room had stopped at exactly 9:21PM — the time of death. Aware of how this bizarre occurrence could foment the mystical imagination in unscientific minds, Feynman reasoned for an explanation. Remembering that he had repaired the clock multiple times over the course of Arline’s stay at the sanatorium, he realized that the instrument’s unwieldy mechanism must have choked when the nurse picked it up in the low evening light to see and record the time. How astonishing and how touchingly human, then, that Feynman penned the letter Gleick found in the box forty-two years later — a letter he wrote to Arline in October of 1946, 488 days after her death: D’Arline, I adore you, sweetheart. I know how much you like to hear that — but I don’t only write it because you like it — I write it because it makes me warm all over inside to write it to you. It is such a terribly long time since I last wrote to you — almost two years but I know you’ll excuse me because you understand how I am, stubborn and realistic; and I thought there was no sense to writing. But now I know my darling wife that it is right to do what I have delayed in doing, and that I have done so much in the past. I want to tell you I love you. I want to love you. I always will love you. I find it hard to understand in my mind what it means to love you after you are dead — but I still want to comfort and take care of you — and I want you to love me and care for me. I want to have problems to discuss with you — I want to do little projects with you. I never thought until just now that we can do that. What should we do. We started to learn to make clothes together — or learn Chinese — or getting a movie projector. Can’t I do something now? No. I am alone without you and you were the “idea-woman” and general instigator of all our wild adventures. When you were sick you worried because you could not give me something that you wanted to and thought I needed. You needn’t have worried. Just as I told you then there was no real need because I loved you in so many ways so much. And now it is clearly even more true — you can give me nothing now yet I love you so that you stand in my way of loving anyone else — but I want you to stand there. You, dead, are so much better than anyone else alive. I know you will assure me that I am foolish and that you want me to have full happiness and don’t want to be in my way. I’ll bet you are surprised that I don’t even have a girlfriend (except you, sweetheart) after two years. But you can’t help it, darling, nor can I — I don’t understand it, for I have met many girls and very nice ones and I don’t want to remain alone — but in two or three meetings they all seem ashes. You only are left to me. You are real. My darling wife, I do adore you. I love my wife. My wife is dead. Rich. And then, with the sole defibrillator for heartache we have — humor — Feynman adds: PS Please excuse my not mailing this — but I don’t know your new address. Complement this particular portion of the altogether magnificent [Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman]( with Rachel Carson’s stunning deathbed farewell to her beloved and Seneca on [resilience in the face of loss]( then revisit Feynman on [science and religion]( and [the meaning of life](. [Forward to a friend]( / [Read Online]( / [Like on Facebook]( [Meet Cipe Pineles: The Remarkable Life and Illustrated Recipes of the Forgotten Pioneer Who Blazed the Way for Women in Design and Publishing]( One late February afternoon in 2013, as my then-partner and I were cooking dinner at home in New York, my phone rang. It was my dear friend and frequent collaborator [Wendy MacNaughton](. She knew that I feel about the telephone [the way Barthes did]( so I in turn knew that there was some momentous reason for the call. Wendy was calling from the California International Antiquarian Book Fair, where behind a glass case she had discovered something she intuitively recognized as a rare treasure — a set of vibrant original paintings of traditional Jewish foods, alongside recipes written in a most unusual, meticulously hand-lettered typeface. It bore the feisty title “Leave Me Alone with the Recipes” and was dated 1945. When our mutual friend Sarah Rich joined Wendy at the fair, their inquiry about the author of this magical manuscript was met with a name that meant nothing to either of them: Cipe Pineles (June 23, 1908–January 3, 1991). Upon probing further, they were jarred to realize that the name should not only mean something to them, but should mean very much indeed — especially since Wendy is an illustrator and Sarah a writer with a background in food and design. Cipe Pineles, they found out, was a trailblazer who paved the way for women in design, illustration, and publishing — the first in many boys’ clubs, a woman who embodied Audre Lorde’s assertion that [“that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength.”]( She was also a pioneer of bringing fine artists to magazines — she hired visionary artists like [Ben Shahn]( and gave young Andy Warhol, who considered her his favorite art director, his first editorial commissions. Cipe Pineles (Photograph: Trude Fleischmann) Wendy and Sarah had called us to see if Debbie and I wanted to split the cost of the illustrated manuscript four ways — it was too pricey for them alone, but they felt strongly that this was a treasure worth salvaging from antiquarian obscurity. Debbie and I heartily agreed. None of us had any sense at the time of what we had acquired or how it could live, but a strange and wonderful Rube Goldberg machine of serendipity followed, culminating in [Leave Me Alone with the Recipes: The Life, Art, and Cookbook of Cipe Pineles]( ([public library]( — a labor of love four years in the making, using the illustrated recipes as a centrifugal force for a larger celebration Cipe’s far-reaching legacy. This part-cookbook and part-monograph was meticulously researched and edited by Sarah and Wendy, with contributions by Debbie and me, alongside a small clan of art and design titans whose work was directly or indirectly influenced by Cipe’s legacy: Artist [Maira Kalman]( painted a one-page love letter to Cipe; design legend [Paula Scher]( eulogized Cipe’s tireless crusade for diversity in a field composed almost entirely of white men; design historian [Steven Heller]( chronicled how Cipe’s monumental influence as an art director and educator shaped the sensibility of generations; legendary food writer Mimi Sheraton, at ninety-one, recounted working among the editorial staff at Seventeen under Cipe’s leadership and reflected on their shared culinary and cultural heritage. Art by Maira Kalman for [Leave Me Alone with the Recipes: The Life, Art, and Cookbook of Cipe Pineles]( Below is my own contribution — a biographical essay exploring how Cipe harnessed her outsider status as woman and immigrant to revolutionize a hegemony — as it appears in the book: BECOMING CIPE: OUTSIDERDOM AND PERSEVERANCE Cipe Pineles was the first independent female graphic designer in America, the first female member of the prestigious Art Directors Club, and the first woman inducted into the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame. A quarter century would pass before another woman was inducted, months before Pineles’s death. Pineles was posthumously awarded the lifetime achievement medal from the American Institute of Graphic Arts, the Nobel Prize of design. And yet through all of her acclaim, Pineles was animated not by ego but by a tremendous generosity of spirit. She saw her success as belonging not to her alone but to all the women whom she was pulling up the ranks along with her, to the young designers whose lives and worlds she shaped as an educator and mentor, and to the American public, whose taste she subtly and systematically refined through the unfaltering vision that defined her life’s work. When I first heard of Cipe Pineles, I thought of her counterpart [Maria Mitchell]( — a pioneer no less trailblazing in opening up an entire world of possibility to women, yet no less lamentably forgotten. One sweltering July afternoon, I found myself stunned before one particular object at the birthplace of Maria Mitchell — America’s first woman astronomer — on the small island of Nantucket. In the nineteenth century, Mitchell paved the way for women in science and became the first woman employed by the United States Federal Government for a nonspecialized domestic skill — she was hired as “computer of Venus” for the United States Nautical Almanac, performing complex mathematical computations to guide sailors around the world. She was also the first woman elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. It would be another ninety years until the second woman — legendary anthropologist [Margaret Mead]( — was admitted. The item that stopped my stride, hanging humbly in the hallway of Mitchell’s small Quaker home, was her certificate of admission into the Academy. On it, the salutation “Sir” was crossed out in pencil and “honorary member” was handwritten over the printed “Fellow.” This yellowing piece of paper was the fossil of a quiet, monumental revolution — the record of an opening hand-etched into a glass ceiling centuries thick. Like Mitchell’s, Pineles’s path to success was neither straight nor free of obstacles. Born to Orthodox Jewish parents in Vienna at the end of Europe’s last untroubled decade before the horrors of the World Wars forever scarred the face of the Old World, young Ciporah — who soon became Cipe and never looked back — grew up as the second youngest child in a family of five, with two sisters and two older brothers. In search of relief for her father’s diabetes more than a decade before the first insulin injection saved a human life, Cipe and her family migrated across Europe’s most venerated spas and sanatoria before settling in Poland, right outside Warsaw. (How tempting to imagine young Cipe crossing paths, without ever knowing it, with some of Europe’s intellectual titans who frequented the continent’s spas around the same time, seeking cure for their own bodily bedevilments — [Rainer Maria Rilke]( [Hermann Hesse]( [Franz Kafka]( From a young age, flavor and color were married for Cipe. One of her earliest memories was of walking in the woods with her siblings, gathering strawberries — “red caps through the green grass” — and sitting down by the river to savor them. In childhood, as in her professional life decades later, she was also unafraid of a difficult and even dangerous climb to the top. She recounted one particularly memorable hike in the mountains on the border between Poland and the area then known as Bohemia, on which she and her siblings had chosen one of the highest and most formidable peaks to climb. “With great difficulties after falling a few times we reached at last the top,” she wrote — a sentence of inadvertent prescience as an existential allegory for her later life in the creative world. But the adventurous idyll was violently interrupted by the outbreak of World War I. Shortly after Russia’s Red Army invaded Poland in 1920, twelve-year-old Cipe and her family returned to Vienna. Years later, as a high school senior in America, she won a national essay contest by the Atlantic for her vivid eyewitness account of the Bolshevik-inflicted tumult in Europe, which she described as a time of “suspense, excitement, and uncertainty.” Back in Vienna, the Pineles sisters had set about learning English by memorizing Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol — a strategy with a serendipitous payoff when they finally arrived in America in mid-October of 1923 (“a very beautiful day,” Cipe recalled of the morning she first glimpsed the Statue of Liberty) and entered school just before the holidays, impressing classmates with their season-appropriate vocabulary. “From the beginning we have hard work,” she wrote shortly after arriving, “but I think that in a few months, when we will speak and understand more English it will be much easier.” So began Pineles’s life in America as a prototypical immigrant, marked by the peculiar, if lonely-making, privilege of being in a culture but not of it. [“There accrue to the outsider great benefits,”]( wrote the trailblazing biochemist Erwin Chargaff — a compatriot and contemporary of Pineles’s, who immigrated to America around the same time and for similar reasons. The European sensibility she had unconsciously absorbed in her formative years would later bring to her design work a level of originality and sophistication that rose above her American peers. At the end of her senior year of high school, classmates wrote alongside her yearbook portrait: “She knows she draws well. A little Polish girl who won our hearts.” She was voted “best natured member” of her graduating class — a title that reflected the core values of kindness and generosity that never left her, even as she ascended the rungs of the corporate world in the golden age of unfeeling self-actualization. During her final year of high school, Cipe received a fifty-dollar art scholarship — a non-negligible sum that covered more than a third of the annual art school tuition at Pratt, where she enrolled in the fall of 1926. Her graduation portfolio at Pratt was strewn with food paintings, from a loaf of bread to a chocolate cake. It was also an ode to her first big love, watercolor. Once again, a sort of character summary by her classmates appeared next to her senior portrait: The most remarkable water colorist in our class. Boys, it’s too late: Cipe is wedded to her art — and they’re both happy. Beneath the tongue-in-cheek remark lay a deeper truth about Cipe’s attitude toward art and marriage — one nurtured by her older brother Sam, who was instrumental in encouraging her vocational autonomy. Before Pratt, she had voiced to him her reservation that attending college would keep her from finding a husband to support her. Sam reportedly replied: “Marriage is not a full-time occupation. Did you ever hear of a doctor or a lawyer giving up his profession because he was getting married?” (That her youngest sister became a doctor in an era when the field was almost entirely male is probably not coincidental.) In another conversation, Sam reiterated the sentiment: “Marriage is not a substitute for having something to do in life.” Pineles did eventually get married — twice — but although she was a classic Jewish mother in some ways, including in the kitchen, she never let her family life contract her expansive devotion to her art. Pineles’s name worked both for and against her. To the American ear, Cipe Pineles bears a peculiar ambiguity. An ambiguous foreign name functions like the screen behind which orchestra auditions are performed — the applicant’s gender, ethnicity, age, and other potential points of bias are obscured to let the music speak for itself. But unlike orchestras, which employ this strategy deliberately to avoid bias, the magazine world of mid-century America had no such noble commitment to impartiality. The screen of Cipe Pineles’s name was accidental and as soon as her gendered identity was revealed, the opportunities dwindled or disappeared altogether. She would later recount: “I would drop my portfolio off at various advertising agencies. But the people who liked my work and were interested enough to ask me in for an interview had assumed by my name that I was a man! When they finally met me, they were disappointed, and I left the interview without a chance for the job.” Some prospective employers explained that if she were hired, she’d have to work in the bullpen — an enormous corporate hangar of men — where a woman’s presence would be ill-advised and downright unwelcome. Still, she pressed on. Reluctantly, she took a job as a watercolor teacher at New Jersey’s Newark Public School of Fine and Industrial Art in the fall of 1929, at a salary of ten dollars a week, but she continued to search for work in the commercial world. Compounding the persistent gender obstacle was the inopportune timing of cultural catastrophe: Pineles had graduated from Pratt just before the devastating stock market crash of 1929 and was attempting to enter the workforce at the dawn of the Great Depression. Determined to succeed, she scoured the New York Public Library for a list of advertising agencies working with food accounts, purposefully pursuing her passion for the intersection of food and graphic art. She was eventually hired by Contempora — the experimental consortium of designers, artists, and architects including Lucian Bernhard, Paul Poiret, Rockwell Kent and others — where she designed fabric designs and dimensional displays. But her real breakthrough came obliquely to her direct efforts. The magazine magnate Condé Nast saw her pattern design and window fabric displays for Contempora. They were unlike anything Nast had seen. He immediately hired Pineles as an editorial designer for Vogue and Vanity Fair, both of which she imprinted with her singular vision. She continued to move up in the magazine world. By the mid-1940s, she was shaping the visual voice of Glamour and earning the magazine every prestigious accolade of design. It was in this period that she began illustrating [Leave Me Alone with the Recipes]( perhaps because she was contending for the first time with negotiating the competing roles of traditional womanhood and a thriving corporate career, which she followed to the very top over the next half-century, eventually pouring the confluence of her accomplished expertise and her generosity of spirit into teaching as well. She became a passionate and beloved educator at Parsons, where she taught editorial design for nearly two decades. Exactly thirty years after she wrote and illustrated her family cookbook, Pineles had a chance to resurrect her love of the intersection of the culinary and graphic arts. In 1975 — a tumultuous year for her, marked by her induction into the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame and the sudden death of her lover — she spearheaded the Parsons yearbook project, themed “cheap eats”: a collection of illustrated recipes for delicious but affordable meals by students, faculty, and celebrated artists such as Maurice Sendak, Larry Rivers, and Elaine de Kooning. Alongside an original painting, Pineles herself contributed a recipe for kasha served with meatballs, a version of which appears in [Leave Me Alone with the Recipes](. The students’ introduction to the yearbook encapsulated Pineles’s influence as an educator, artists, and cross-pollinator of food and design, and it captured the spirit and sensibility of her unpublished 1945 family cookbook with uncanny precision. They wrote: The style is in the color, the scale, the original and unusual use of common items and of art materials. The recipes and ideas in this cookbook are made with the same ingredients any student on a budget would buy; but it is the resourcefulness and inventiveness as well as the artists’ love for cooking which make for good design and especially creative meals. Eating is more than food… it is visual impact, contrast, style, scale, mood, fragrance, color. Visual impact, indeed, was the raw material of Pineles’s work. But from it radiated a larger legacy of cultural impact. A century earlier, to her first class of female astronomers at Vassar, Maria Mitchell had remarked, [“No woman should say, ‘I am but a woman!’ But a woman! What more can you ask to be?”]( Pineles’s life and legacy were one quiet but continuous incarnation of this incantation, the reverberations of which live on as the palpable pulse animating the corpus of possibility for every contemporary woman in publishing and graphic design. [Forward to a friend]( / [Read Online]( / [Like on Facebook]( [BP] If you enjoy my newsletter, please consider helping me keep it going with a modest [donation](. [Donate]( You're receiving this email because you subscribed on Brain Pickings. This weekly newsletter comes out on Sundays and offers the week's most unmissable articles. Our mailing address is: Brain Pickings :: Made inBrooklyn, NY 11201 [Add us to your address book](//brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/vcard?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=179ffa2629) [unsubscribe from this list]( [update subscription preferences](