The Idiocy of Second-Guessing Order

This first ran on June 15, 2020 but it is about what happened the previous January. January 2020: things were objectively scary, what with an honest-to-goodness international pandemic and a blind-sided health community. I don’t think things have objectively improved since then, not on the whole, because even though that pandemic wound down, the next […]

Our Moon

Last week, Ann wrote about her moon epiphany and Our Becky’s book (Ann: “Our Moon, you know the one, lead review in the NYTimes Book Review, longlisted for the National Book Award”) about our most glorious satellite. I got to ask Becky about Our Moon in January, and I’m thinking of this conversation again at […]

Moon Not Shining of Its Own Light

I was reading Becky’s beautiful book (Our Moon, you know the one, lead review in the NYTimes Book Review, longlisted for the National Book Award) and she was talking about how ancient people figured out amazing things about the moon. And by the way, ancient people figured out amazing things in general, like the circumference […]

Conversation: Richard & the Pillars of Creation

ANN:  Richard Panek has just published a book called The Pillars of Creation.  It’s about the James Webb Space Telescope — which I call JWST and Richard calls Webb, and there’s a story behind that difference but it’s not relevant here — and how it got built and what it’s finding.  And Richard, this is […]

Synchronicity

I believe.  I don’t know in what exactly, but something is happening out there, gears and orbits turning, disparate points meeting, then moving apart. We’re bound in ways unexplained by simple principles of causality. That is my belief. My youngest turned 18 last week as comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS passed at its closest to Earth, which didn’t […]

Stars are Born

Last week, I crabbed over papers at a late-night kitchen table while my very pregnant step daughter stood near me with her hands clasped atop the globe of her belly. She’d been pacing for most of an hour, not wanting to sleep or sit down. She wanted her pelvis as open as she could make […]

Look up

On May 10, I leave my house in northern Washington state just after dawn. I drive alone along a braided river, over sagebrush plateaus, and through fields of golden flowers. Then one plane across the Cascades, and another across the Rockies, to finally land in my my childhood home in Colorado. I’ve come to stand […]