How the gaps in gravity contour the next frontiers in the quest to understand the fundaments of what we are. Between the time Hypatia of Alexandria first pointed her pre-telescopic eye to the cosmos millennia before the notion of galaxies and the time Vera Rubin stood at the foot of the world’s most powerful telescope […]
“The more stressful the environment, the more likely you are to see plants working together to ensure mutual survival.” In 1977, a young forestry student tasked with marking an ironwood tree for “release cutting” — the logging or poisoning of particular trees on the dogmatic premise that their demise would release more commercially valuable nearby […]
“There seems little doubt that the application of the principles of ecology to human affairs, whether personal, national or world-wide, would go far in solving the problems that beset us.” “There is one book that I would rather have produced than all my novels,” Willa Cather rued in her most candid interview about creativity. That […]
“Art is a matter of enjoyment through the five senses. Unless you can see the beauty all around you everywhere, and enjoy it, you can never comprehend art.” “Her voice is deep, rich, and full of color; she speaks with her whole body, like a singer… Whatever she does is done with every fibre,” a […]
Facing the logical fallacies that fuel painful emotional patterns and what it takes to break them with dignity, mindfulness, and emotional maturity. “Across the morning sky, all the birds are leaving,” Nina Simone sang in 1969. “How can they know that it’s time to go?” A decade earlier, a young Swiss psychologist traversed the Atlantc […]
“Forgiving… is the only reaction which does not merely re-act but acts anew and unexpectedly, unconditioned by the act which provoked it and therefore freeing from its consequences both the one who forgives and the one who is forgiven.” “To forgive is to assume a larger identity than the person who was first hurt,” poet […]
“Don’t start with a big idea. Start with a phrase, a line, a quote. Questions are very helpful. Begin with a few you’re carrying right now.” “A self-respecting artist must not fold his hands on the pretext that he is not in the mood,” Tchaikovsky wrote to his patron as he contemplated the interplay of […]
“A metaphor is language that simultaneously creates and solves its own riddle; within that minute explosion of mind is both expansion and release… It is how the mind instructs itself in a more complex seeing.” It is a marvel, though hardly a surprise, that children’s minds are machines for metaphor. We are meaning-making creatures — […]
How the world relished the world before Instagram. To put our familiar lives in perspective and jolt us awake to the wonder of so much we have come to take for granted, let us picture this: It is the 1840s and you, like most of humanity, have never traveled more than a few miles beyond […]
“Innovators always seek to revitalize, extend and reconstruct the status quo in their given fields… Quite often they are the rejects, outcasts, sub-citizens, etc. of the very societies to which they bring so much sustenance.” To create anything of beauty, daring, and substance that makes the world see itself afresh — be it a revolutionary […]