Art
Key:* = Pretty darn sure** = Scientists are making some educated guesses here Hundreds of millions of years ago during the Ordovician period, someone blorped and wiggled around in the shallow waters off Gondwana.* This someone didn’t have jaws or fins,** nor did they have utility bills or shoelaces.* Their name—as assigned by strangers who […]
Early in the pandemic, in the spring of 2020, a neighbor was moving out in a hurry. She and her husband had been living separately for some reason – academia-related? – but suddenly she was able to work from anywhere, so she packed up the baby and left. In the process she gave away all […]
This essay originally appeared in 2012. If the artwork above looks familiar, the reason might be that it was part of the argument that Ann made in a recent post. She suggested that the beauty of the Florentine paintings of the fifteenth century—“stunning, literally; you look at them and can hardly breathe”—couldn’t have been due […]