Mass, Energy, and How Literature Transforms the Dead Weight of Being: Jeanette Winterson on Why We Read
And later, when I had left home at sixteen and was living in a Mini, I had my favourite books stashed in the boot and whenever I could be in the library, I was there. …
Murmuration: A Stunning Animated Poem About Our Connection to Nature and to Each Other
2*At the midnight of the yearutter darknessa million compasses failand the starlings don’t comeempty skyno swallows, no swiftsno summer nests in the eavesthreads looped in the bluea blackbird that isn’t thereopens his throatinto silence, thin …
Confucius on Good Government, the 6 Steps to a Harmonious Society, and Self-Discipline as the Key to Democracy
Two and a half millennia before Leonard Cohen wrote in his timeless and tender ode to democracy that “the heart has got to open in a fundamental way,” the ancient Chinese philosopher and statesman Confucius …
The Boy Whose Head Was Filled with Stars: The Inspiring Illustrated Story of How Edwin Hubble Revolutionized Our Understanding of the Universe
It is there, looking through the colossal instrument night after cold night, that Hubble becomes obsessed with the Andromeda Nebula, then believed to be a swirl of gas and dust within our own galaxy. He …
Einstein on the Political Power of Art
When he returned to New York with a wounded body and a scarred soul, he spent six months recovering at the VA hospital, then poured his surviving spirit into a stirring narrative suite of fifty-five …
Dotspotting Expressionist Science: What the Mysterious Color-Markings on Storm Drains Have to Do with Rachel Carson’s Legacy and the War on a Deadly Virus
They are science. They are war paint on humanity’s countenance as we combat our great eternal enemy: the mosquito. But Carson’s most visionary proposition, decades ahead of science, was the development of biological controls that …
Loops, the Limits of Language, the Paradoxical Loneliness of “I Love You,” and What Keeps Love Alive
With an eye to the limitation of these words — of all words — as “the primary and somehow insignificant expression of a fulfillment,” Barthes adds with a conspiratorial wink: This renders the exchange of …
The Blue Hour: A Stunning Illustrated Celebration of Nature’s Rarest Color
The day ends.The night falls.And in between…there is the blue hour. But despite Earth’s distinction as the Solar System’s “Pale Blue Dot,” this planetary blueness is only a perceptual phenomenon arising from how our particular …
Dignity, Daring, and Disability: The Pioneering Queer Composer and Defiant Genius Ethel Smyth on Making Music While Going Deaf
Look dearest Ethel…. Please live 50 years at least; for now I’ve formed this limpet childish attachment it can’t but be part of my simple anatomy for ever — wanting Ethel — I say, live, …
Conchology, or, the Natural History of Shells: Stunning 19th-Century Illustrations from the World’s First Pictorial Encyclopedia of Mollusks
The study of Shells, or testaceous animals, is a branch of natural history which, although not greatly useful to the mechanical arts, or the human economy, is, nevertheless, by the beauty of the subjects it …