Another Miscellany from My Cabinet of Curiosities
The spectrometer for the KATRIN experiment, moving threateningly through the narrow streets of Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen towards the Karlsruhe Institute of...
The Island and the Lion
In a couple of days as I write this — on Monday, September 23rd to be precise — I’ll be talking with David Brooks here in Waco about his recent work. If...
Fairs
PSA: Next Monday Baylor’s Institute for the Studies of Religion will be hosting a conversation between David Brooks and me on his recent (and maybe...
Ireland and Dessert
Thomas Flanagan (1923-2002) was an American professor of literature who, in his fifties, turned his hand to writing novels, and wrote three of the finest...
A Little Something Extra: Design
Lotería is a Mexican game, sort of like bingo but played with colorful cards rather than ping-pong balls. This year the San Antonio Spurs — my favorite NBA...
Language, Language!
One dyadic station shopping head elects. Victor Mair is the Sherlock Holmes of Chinglish, but this time he’s faced with a devilishly clever challenge to his...
Jubilee, and Knell
Giorgio de Chirico, Metaphysical Interior with a Factory (1969) An except from Memory Police, by Yoko Ogawa: The disappearance of the birds, as with so many...
New Model Protest
In my last newsletter I mentioned the hand signals that the Hong Kong protestors have developed. But that only scratches the surface of their ingenuity and...
The Human as Machine, and Addict, and Friend
The analogy of man to machine was a widespread cultural trend in the 1920s and 30s. The explosion of industry and consumer technology in the early 20th...
Cups, Bees, and an Angry Playwright
This is one of those design ideas that you perceive the absolute genius of at your very first glance: The most recent episode of the ReWork podcast tells the...
A Miscellany of Trivia
Perhaps you’ve always wanted to see a copy of Brian Eno’s synthesizer license: You can tell that it’s authentic by the way it incorporates all the initials...
Caine and Kane and Kavalier
The Caine Mutiny is a great movie for our moment, because it’s a story that has a kind of relentless moral momentum. You can see almost from the beginning...
A Great Historian and a House that Learns
Gilbert White was an eighteenth-century cleric and naturalist whose book The Natural History of Selborne is one of the classics of nature writing. His home...
Grace, Beauty, Misery, and Other Dances
My brilliant friend Adam Roberts in Image, on the possible theological implications of space travel: Grace seems to me a good way of approaching First Man;...
Going to Titan and Giving Thanks
A little early this time, but the quiver is full, so what the heck. Dragonfly is headed for Titan. Ted Gioia: Especially over the last five years...
The Work of the Three Minds
Margaret Chodos-Irvine, illustrations for Always Coming Home A conversation between Pandora and the Archivist in in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home:...
To Utopia and Back
That’s the sun rising on a hill above Laity Lodge, one of my favorite places, one of the most thoroughly peaceful spots on this planet. Every time I’m there...
Found Coins and Lost Rivers
Here’s another single-theme newsletter — arriving a little early, because I’m about to leave for a week of writing and thinking and praying at my beloved...
Unexpected Discoveries and Unnoticed Pleasures
Milan’s vertical forest In 1964 an Edinburgh antiques dealer dropped five quid on a small carved figure which he kept around the house. His children and...
Summer Edition: Trees, Islands, and a Game of Base Ball
John Constable, Trees at Hampstead, in the Tate On September 21, 1868, a man named Peter Doyle wrote a letter to his friend Walt Whitman and described an...