David Grinspoon is a comparative planetologist and an astrobiologist. He’s also a big book nerd, and his love for both fiction and nonfiction are proudly on display in his own book, Earth In Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet’s Future. The book was recently featured in an ongoing series on “Resistance Reading” selected by authors and published […]
Literature
AG’s giving Dickens a happy ending here. The cartoon’s secret mouseover says to consult paragraph 1, chapter 3, of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. In that chapter, a banker is on his way to a mysterious meeting in which he’s to learn who was buried, how that person came back to life, and […]
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud by William Wordsworth I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o’er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. Continuous as the stars that […]
“Look, our snowman is still there,” I said Monday morning. “Oh!” my daughter said. “It is! Mommy, will it be there for all the times?” I picked her up. “No, it won’t,” I said. “I think it will melt. Remember how we talked about snow melting?” “Oh,” my 3-year-old said. “Okay.” Her disappointment was audible. I […]
When Robert Macfarlane recently chose “antevernals” as one of his words of the day, I remembered this post, which I wrote in February 2016. Now we need a word to describe our continent’s increasingly split-screen winters. How about twinter? Or splinter? And climate change isn’t the only phenomenon demanding new vocabulary: I sometimes hear others […]
My alma mater is, for better or worse, the undergraduate equivalent of a cult film: Most people have never heard of Reed College, and the few who have really like to argue about it. So it’s disconcerting when arguments usually confined to the Reed campus attract national attention. In recent days, a Washington Post column […]
Helen: Ann, we’re here because you said you hate moors. I am currently having a love affair with moors, so I want to know: Why? Also, we’re here because I suspect this will give us an opportunity to talk about how much we hate Wuthering Heights. Unless you like Wuthering Heights. Do you like Wuthering […]
I’d been reading a book by Colm Tóibín called House of Names. The house is the House of Atreus; Tóibín explained through a character why he substituted “names,” but I didn’t understand it. He took the story pretty faithfully from the plays of Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripedes about one or all members of the family. […]