Enlarge / Radiant: The Scientist, the Dancer, and a Friendship Forged in Light explores the lives of Marie Curie and Loïe Fuller. (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images) Both the arts and the sciences flourished in Paris during the years of the so-called Belle Époque at the dawn of the 20th century. This was when Nobel Prize-winning […]
The story of a forgotten visionary suspended between science and spiritual yearning, who inspired Kant and anticipated Hubble. Thomas Wright (September 22, 1711–February 25, 1786) grew up with a passion for learning and a speech impediment that made the rural English schoolroom a gauntlet. When he set about educating himself at home, his father declared […]
A rare and rapturous glimpse of the slow double embrace by which some of Earth’s tenderest creatures make more of themselves. In February 2018, I found myself on a friend’s fruit farm in Kauai, having gratefully escaped the short bleak days of Brooklyn winter to finish Figuring. Each day, being a creature of loops and […]
A bittersweet signal from the discomposing territory between reason and hope. This essay is excerpted from the thirteenth chapter of Figuring, titled “The Banality of Survival.” In the spring of 1849, ten years before On the Origin of Species shook the foundation of humanity’s understanding of life, the polymathic astronomer John Herschel — coiner of […]
“Through your words I feel so close to you that I can feel your laughter, so clean and honest.” In the hottest month of 1913, the Stockinger Printing Company in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, hired as a colorist and engraver a twenty-one-year-old Hungarian artist who had just arrived in America as a refugee with $25 and an […]
I grew up a Black kid in white classrooms in Silver Spring, Maryland. I tested well and was deemed “gifted and talented”. That meant my classes had cutting edge technology, teachers with fancy degrees and books without holes in them because my classmates’ parents were white. They influenced the county to ensure our classes had […]
A coming-of-age story about racial identity in America today; a highly anticipated cathartic novel about a life-changing weekend shared between strangers; and an authoritative new work from a tech industry titan with a plan for how the world can get to zero greenhouse gas emissions in time to avoid a climate catastrophe. Here are eight […]
“The art of losing isn’t hard to master.” I will never forget the day I first encountered, in the midst of heartache, “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop (February 8, 1911–October 6, 1979) — a poem I have lived with for years, a poem that has helped me live. Composed when Bishop was sorrowing after a […]
“Books read us back to ourselves… The escape into another story reminds us that we too are another story. Not caught, not confined, not predestined.” “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us,” Kafka wrote to his childhood friend just as he was setting out on a life of making and […]
A collaborative praise song for “indifference banished by love.” In one of the essays collected in Vesper Flights (public library) — which was among the finest books of 2020 and includes one of the most magnificent things ever written about the enchantment of the total solar eclipse — Helen Macdonald reflects on watching starlings swarm […]