This post is not implying a resemblance between the current pandemic and the perfect storm of disasters that hit Florence in the mid-1300s. Nor is it evidence for the half-assed notion that out of disaster comes good. It is only to say that sometimes beauty has deep roots. This first ran January 17, 2012. To […]
“It was nothing to just sit on the phone for an hour, wrapped up in those long curly cords,” writes my friend. “An hour-long phone conversation was totally normal. In my teenage years, I could just sit on the phone all night long.” That’s a comforting image, isn’t it — my friend but younger, curled […]
Freeman Dyson’s death is a little like the death of the last member of a rare species, only he didn’t even belong to a species, he was a one-off individual, he was singular. The point is, the world is a less interesting place now. I wrote two posts about him; one was about his astonishingly […]
My neighbor likes to ask big questions about big ideas. He’s not pretentious and doesn’t pontificate, so I think he just likes big questions. Anyway, the other day he asked what the necessary components of an ideal public education were. “Writing,” I said, naturally. He agreed partly because, he said, good writing involves good thinking. […]
This morning, mid-January, sandwiched between the past few days of fog and rainy gloom and future days of cold and snowy mix, the sun did this. I’d been having the flu, not getting 5 feet away from the couch, and the sun was so stunning I walked out on the porch and stood in it. […]
Dateline: mid-January, 2020. Location: Baltimore, MD. Meterological conditions: first snow of the season, 1 inch max. Early that evening, rumor apparently came of an imminent invasion. So the local militia began work on fortifications. They packed cold-certified plastic cubes with snow, then pushed the cubes of snow out and stacked them without reference to engineering […]
That’s a somewhat newer mission patch from the National Reconnaissance Office, the spy satellite outfit which is clearly still at the top of its game. The amateur NRO watchers are still watching. I follow some of them on Twitter. Lately they’ve also been watching: the Starlink satellites, the launch of international asteroid probes, pretty pictures […]
*Now with UPDATES, below: Betelgeuse (pronounced Beetlejuice) is a star, the red one on the left shoulder of Orion. You’ve seen it. One of the whole points of stars is that you can just look up and count on seeing them. The earth turns underneath them so it’s true that depending on time and geography, […]