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 […]
Astronomy
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 […]
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 […]
This was first published October 21, 2019 but the universe hasn’t changed much in the years since. I mean, a few stars may have come and gone but on the whole, the universe is too big to change that fast. But we, at least we in the US, we’ve changed though. We seem to have […]
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 […]
Eclipse The earth moved to follow his smile, but she stood aside, let the planet pass. Her signs were subtler: quivers of little stars, the sucking dark depths of the ocean. Young women turned their faces to him like flowers, hoping for a laugh, an accidental touch, and men labored hard to prove their worth […]
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 […]
A defensive back playing for a Texas university football team recently said something unusual into a press microphone. “I don’t believe in space,” he said. “I’m religious, so I think, like, we’re on our own right now. I don’t think there’s, like, other planets and stuff like that.” I welcome eccentric ways of thinking. Being […]
