Charles Schulz, who was born on this day in 1922, does a lot with nothing. With “Peanuts,” he created a cartoon cast of kids who don’t behave or speak as kids do and placed them in a nondescript setting. Yet the comic is alive with wonder, possibility, and humanity. Schulz wanted to tell hard truths about intelligent things. “But the main truth he tells is that there are no answers to the big questions. In the long run, no one wins, and no one loses; this isn’t drama—it’s life,” writes Nicole Rudick, editor of The Paris Review and ArtForum. “The strip’s solace is that the reader isn’t alone in facing these fraught issues, and its gift is a space in which she is invited to think, to contemplate the big picture on a small scale.”