Reads tagged with “science”
The Log from the Sea of Cortez: John Steinbeck’s Forgotten Masterpiece on How to Think and the Art of Seeing the Pattern Beyond the Particular
“Everything impinges on everything else… Everything is potentially everywhere.”
The Otherworldly Wonders of This World: Stunning 19th-Century Natural History Illustrations of Lizards
From geckos to chameleons, a scaly journey down the hallway of evolutionary time through the portal of beauty.
How to Cherish Your Human Condition: The Poetic Naturalist Loren Eiseley on the Meaning of Life
“The truth is that we are all potential fossils still carrying within our bodies the crudities of former existences, the marks of a world in which living creatures flow with little more consistency than clouds from age to age.”
The Enigma of the Eel: The Elusive Science of Earth’s Most Mysterious Creature
“Science has come up against many mysteries, but few have proven as intractable and difficult to solve as the eel.”
Astronomy as Existential Calibration: A Poetic Manifesto for Science from Two Centuries Before the Golden Age of Space Telescopes
“Astronomy has enlarged the sphere of our conceptions, and opened to us a universe without bounds, where the human Imagination is lost.”
The Temple of Flora: Stunning Illustrations of Flowers Inspired by Erasmus Darwin’s Radical Scientific Poem About the Sexual Reproduction of Plants
“If thou art perfectly at leisure… walk in, and view the wonders of my enchanted garden.”
The Unphotographable #7: Richard Powers on the Majestic Mass Migration of Sandhill Cranes
Sometimes, a painting in words is worth a thousand pictures. I think about this more and more, in our compulsively visual culture, which increasingly reduces what we think and feel and see — who and what we are — to what can be photographed. I think of Susan Sontag, who called it “aesthetic consumerism” half a century before Instagram. In a small act of resistance, I offer The Unphotographable — Saturdays, a lovely image in words drawn from centuries of literature: passages transcendent and transportive, depicting landscapes and experiences radiant with beauty and feeling beyond what a visual image could convey.
Mesmerizing Microphotography of the Hairs of Different Animals Under Polarized Light
A technicolor serenade to the variousness of this world.
Relationship Rupture and the Limbic System: The Physiology of Abandonment and Separation
“A relationship is a physiologic process, as real and as potent as any pill or surgical procedure.”
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