What is PopUp Magazine? A once in a lifetime event, or another San Francisco hype-story? A bit of both, perhaps. In its seventh edition, this San Francisco “happening” may be the next Burning Man in the making. For one evening at Davies Symphony Hall, a sold-out audience comes together to listen to a variety of “mixed-media” tales from a broad range of journalists, relating stories that alternately make you laugh, cry or just shake your head at the diversity of the world we live in.

This years’s PopUp Magazine introduced us to twenty new stories, of which my favorites were:

• Travel: 36 Hours inTristan da Cunha (Andy Isaacson) – A humorous and poignant travelogue of the inhabitants (mostly Brits) of one of the most isolated islands in the world, 500 miles of the West Coast of Africa.
• Lives: Family Reunion (Chris Colin) – One man’s search for his Aunt’s past.
• Family: Fareeda and Nagris (Sonia Faleiro) – A non-judgmental view on the role of women in a rapidly changing India.
• Legal Affairs: Animal Rights (Jennifer Kahn) – Reviewing the literature of the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries, Kahn depicts the hilarious rights awarded to a variety of animals, including boll weevils, over the ages.
• Essay: Fog (Sam Green) -  An elegiac overview of San Francisco’s legendary and inimitable fog, enumerated with slow-motion footage and accompanied by haunting music by the Quakers.

So what makes PopUp Magazine special? A combination of anticipation, a relentlessly hip audience, and excellent vodka tonics with free cheese melts (mad props for the jalapeno cheese.) Mingling afterwards led to meetings with artistic types and fun games, including “what is the best smartphone picture you’ve taken in the last week and why?” All in all, a terrific San Francisco event.

Will it go global? Could PopUp Magazine be the next TED? Time will tell…

Aristotle
When: 384-322BC
Who: Greek all rounder, top of class in ethics, politics, physics, logic, marine biology.
One-Liner: “One swallow does not make spring, nor does one fine day”. “Education is the best provision for the journey into old age.”
Need to know: Father of politics (democracy) and ethics. (The need to be good for a lifetime).
Tome in one sentence: Happiness comes not from self-indulgence, but from acting virtuously.

Thomas Hobbes
When: 1588-1679
Who: Founder of British moral philosophy.
One-Liner: “The life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”
Need to know: A scholar of pleasure and passions. Argued that there were materialist reasons for emotions.
Tome: “Leviathan”
Tome in one sentence: Life needn’t be brutish and short if you create a stable society.

Rene Descartes
When: 1596-1650
Who: Came up with X,Y and Cartesian logic.
One-Liner: “Cogit, ego sum” or “je pense, donc je suis”
Need to know: Thought exists, as does the person doing the thinking.
Tome: “Discourse de la Methode”
Tome in one sentence: Advanced philosophy from “what is objectively true?” to “what can I be sure of?”

Blaise Pascsal
When: 1623-1662
Who: Founder of Pascal’s Wager – If God exists and your believe in him, you are going to heaven; if he doesn’t, you don’t miss out on much.
One-Liner: “I’ve made this letter longer than usual because I didn’t have the time to make it shorter”
Need to know: Scientist who discovered the vacuum. Creator of a religious philosophy that proposes there can be no vacuum in heaven.
Tome: “Pensees”
Tome in one sentence: Bet the farm on God and you needn’t lose your shirt.

John Locke
When: 1632-1704
Who: Oxbridge liberal who dreamt up the political philosophy of the USA. Founding fathers copied much of his manifesto for the Declaration of Independence.
One-Liner: “Man being by nature a power to preserve his property – that is, his life, liberty and estate – against the injuries and attempts of other men”
Need to know: First modern libertarian. All for separation of powers and separation of Church and State.
Tome: “Essay Concerning Human Understanding”
Tome in one sentence: We know nothing when we’re born: knowledge is experience.

Voltaire
When: 1694-1778
Who: Novelist, playwright and philosopher, and keen Anglophile. Lived in exile in Covent Garden.
One-Liner: “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.”
Need to know: Early deist, however he attacked the excesses of both the First and Second Estates – the Clergy and the Aristocracy.
Tome: “Candide, or Optimism”
Tome in one sentence: Attacked Leibnitz via Dr. Pangloss, the relentless optimist who repeatedly said “All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.”

David Hume
When: 1711-1776
Who: Scotsman who put passion into philosophy. Tory, monarchist, and anti-Presbyterian.
One-Liner: “It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.”
Need to know: Reason is a slave of the passions, as is morality. Did not have enough faith to be sure there was no God.
Tome: “A Treatise on Human Nature”
Tome in one sentence: We are simple creatures, our simple ideas produced by simple impressions; and more complicated ideas, such as the idea of God, do not need a god to create them.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
When: 1712-1778
Who: Renaissance man, philosopher, musician and novelist. Pin-up of the French Revolution. Convinced that all society was decadent, he was all for the “noble savage”.
One-Liner: “Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.”
Need to know: Took refuge in Staffordshire after his books were banned in Geneva and France. Recommended sticking to whatever religion you were raised in, as all religions encourage virtue. Further developed Hobbes’ social contract theory.
Tome: “The Social Contract”
Tome in one sentence: The paradox of democracy: the only way to break out of the chains of sufferidge is to submit to the authority of popular will.

Immanuel Kant
When: 1724-1804
Who: German master of the Enlightment, enemy of the white lie.
One-Liner: “Sapere aude!” (Dare to know); “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing can ever be made.”
Need to know: Originator of the categorical imperative: “Act only according to the maxim which you can, at the same time, will to be a Universal Law”. Left no room for white lies.
Tome: “Critique of Pure Reason”
Tome in one sentence: Experience isn’t enough to explain the ways of the world.

Friedrich Nietzsche
When: 1844-1900
Who: Nihilist. Fan of Arthur Schopenhauer’s pessimistic school of philosophy.
One-Liner: “God is dead.” Decided that God’s funeral had been brought on by science and a secular society.
Need to know: Creator of the Übermensch – The superman who lives a higher, creative, energetic life, unlike the dreary masses. Also believed in the will to power.
Tome: “Thus spoke Zarathustra”
Tome in one sentence: Don’t look on the bright side of life – unless you are an übermensch.

Bertrand Russell
When: 1872-1970
Who: Blue-blooded atheist mathematician, pacifist and CND pioneer. Covered everything from math to epistemology and metaphysics.
One-Liner: “Boredom is a vital problem for the moralist, since half the sins of mankind are caused by fear of it.”
Need to know: Dreamt up logical atomism. The world is an accumulation of logical facts that cannot be broken down any further.
Tome: “Mathematica Principia”
Tome in one sentence: All math is logic.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
When: 1889-1951
Who: Austrian analytical philosopher. Had three brothers who all committed suicide. Gave away his inheritance. Taught at Cambridge, where he published a single book.
One-Liner: “What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak therefore one must be silent.” Also, “The world is all that is the case.”
Need to know: Philosophical conversations on religion, ethics and morality are just nonsensical chitchat.
Tome: “Tractus Logico-Philosophicus”
Tome in one sentence: Once you’ve read my ideas, throw them away, much as you would discard a ladder that takes you to a higher plane.

Jean-Paul Sartre
When: 1905-1980
Who: Novelist, playwright, and cafe-creeping, pipe-smoking Parisian existentialist. Married to Simone de Beauvoir.
One-Liner: “Hell is other people.”
Need to know: Hell is also the utter independence of being a human being. Because there’s no God, we are condemned to be free, and we have no excuse for our actions.
Tome: “Being and Nothingness”
Tome in one sentence:Freedom isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be; nor sex.

2. Eminem: Lose Yourself
Marshall Mathers penned “Lose Yourself” to motivate aspiring rappers like the one he portrayed in 8 Mile, but his rousing words ring just as true for athletes hoping to achieve greatness. Eminem’s take on the classic message of giving 110 percent sticks because of his undeniable conviction—and that aggressive beat, of course.

3. Bill Conti: Gonna Fly Now (Rocky’s Theme)
Conti’s iconic, trumpet-laden Rocky theme may be coated with several layers of cheese, but the song is no less effective at doing its job—instigating its listeners to rise above adversity and kick some ass—because of it. If there’s a song better suited for an inspirational montage, we haven’t heard it.

4. Tom Petty: Runnin’ Down a Dream
Petty has roughly 371 songs in his repertoire that espouse the virtues of chasing your dreams, but none hammer the point home as well as “Runnin’ Down a Dream,” and that’s largely due to its simple lyrics and no-frills chorus. And with a bluesy guitar riff that constantly sounds like it’s racing toward the finish line, the song acts as a de-facto running buddy.

5. Kanye West: Stronger
Undeniably huge with industrial-sized synthesizers and a vocal sample lifted from techno titans Daft Punk, “Stronger” is relentless. With a credo for a chorus that every competitor can get behind—“That that don’t kill me can only make me stronger”—West crafted a song to help us push through pain and complete that last, toughest mile.

6. Cake: The Distance
Cake’s ‘90s hit is ostensibly about a lonely racecar driver, but its lyrics freakishly describe what every runner who’s ever churned through a marathon has felt by the midway point: “They deftly maneuver and muscle for rank, fuel burning fast on an empty tank. Reckless and wild, they pour through the turns, their prowess is potent and secretly stern.”

7. Outkast: B.O.B.
“B.O.B.” blasts off at 154 beats per minute and never lets up, twisting through an amalgam of styles (from hip-hop to jungle to metal to gospel) while MCs Andre 3000 and Big Boi try to fit in as many words as they can before they self-combust. A song about the end of the world that sounds like the end of the world, is there any other track more appropriate for one last sweat session on Earth?

8. U2: Beautiful Day
Filled with equal moments of early-morning tenderness (for your dash at dawn) and emotional triumph (for your victory lap), U2’s stirring song is the perfect soundtrack for a jog outside on—you guessed it—a beautiful day. Bonus points for this Bono line, in which the singer acknowledges that sometimes we just need to run: “You’re on the road, but you’ve got no destination.”

9. Elvis Costello: Pump It Up
Driven by a steady, albeit frenzied backbeat that veers from awesome into straight-up nauseating territory by the final coda, “Pump It Up” is the pub-rock equivalent of an alarm clock: It keeps going and going, employing the same repetitive organ hook until you’re prompted to get the hell up and hit the pavement. If only every song could be so motivational.

10. The Darkness: I Believe in a Thing Called Love
The Darkness’ lone U.S. hit is unabashedly corny, showcasing cringe-worthy falsetto vocals, glam guitars, and at least 10 too many mentions of the word “touching”—but no one can deny how hard it rocks. Crank it at parties and it’s impossible not to bust a move; crank it to start your afternoon run and it’s impossible not to break a sweat.