“Courage, devotion, the spirit of sacrifice, are as contagious as cowardice, submission, and panic.” While the trailblazing astronomer Maria Mitchell was contemplating social change and the life of the mind and her contemporary Walt Whitman was instructing America’s young on what it takes to be an agent of change, on the other side of the […]
A playful and poignant what-if for the planet. This is the eighth of nine installments in the animated interlude season of The Universe in Verse in collaboration with On Being, celebrating the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry. See the previous installments here. THE ANIMATED UNIVERSE IN VERSE: CHAPTER EIGHT The […]
“Time renders most individual moments meaningless… but it is only through the passage of time that life acquires its meaning. And that meaning itself is constantly in flux.” In her 1942 book Philosophy in a New Key, the trailblazing philosopher Susanne Langer defined music as “a laboratory for feeling and time.” But perhaps it is […]
“The calm deposition of the rings… has gone on millimeter by millimeter for millennium after millennium — advancing ripples in the tide of time.” “A tree is a little bit of the future,” Wangari Maathai reflected as she set out to plant the million trees that won her the Nobel Peace Prize. But a tree […]
“If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me.” This is the seventh of nine installments in the animated interlude season of The Universe in Verse in collaboration with On Being, celebrating the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry. (The live season is back on.) See the previous […]
Enlarge / Quantum Go Fish is just one of the many math-y games in Ben Orlin’s latest book, Math Games with Bad Drawings . (credit: Ben Orlin) Adapted from Math Games with Bad Drawings (2022) by Ben Orlin. You can read our latest interview with Orlin here . Of the thousand games I encountered in […]
Enlarge / Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe is at heart a game of fractal structure, per math teacher Ben Orlin, author of Math Games with Bad Drawings . Players must balance two levels, an element that requires them to “Think globally, act locally. ” (credit: Ben Orlin) In 1974, a geneticist named Marsha Jean Falco devised an ingenious […]
“To love anybody is to expect something from him, something which can neither be defined nor foreseen; it is at the same time in someway to make it possible for him to fulfill this expectation.” The capacity for hope is not merely a hallmark of human consciousness — it is the supreme umbilical cord between […]
“You’ll long for me when I’m gone… You’ll kiss the headstone of my grave… Kiss my face instead!” “What exists, exists so that it can be lost and become precious,” Lisel Mueller wrote in her short, stunning poem about what gives meaning to our mortal lives. To become precious — that is the work of […]
Enlarge / Anachronistic baroque painting of the pivotal Battle of Actium by Laureys a Castro, 1672. (credit: Public domain) Historians widely consider the Battle of Actium in 31 BCE to be the decisive event that led to Octavian defeating Mark Antony and Cleopatra. The couple committed suicide—Antony by stabbing himself in the stomach, and Cleopatra […]