Redux: Vanishing Points

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 […]

Space Is Real

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 […]

Kate Versus the Meteorite

It came as a surprise, a gift from no one in particular: a blush-pink postcard tucked beneath the bottle of sunscreen in my Sephora order, emblazoned with an utterly mystifying collection of words. HANGOVERx PILLOW BALM (What?) We LOVE your lips even when you don’t (What?) Infused with mineral-rich stardust (WHAT?) The shiny pink button […]

Redux: I Saw Them Standing There

It was 60 years ago today that the Beatles first appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” This post originally ran in 2012. I was watching the Beatles on “Ed Sullivan” the other night when I got to thinking about Galileo. “Ladies and gentlemen, here are The Beatles!” cried Ed, in his imitable style, and the camera […]

Under Bortle 1 Skies

Lately I’ve been lingering in Bortle 1 zones, rare dark places untroubled by human lights. On the scale, 1 is where your eyes discern the faintest satellites and the fuzzballs of nearby galaxies. When you wake hours before dawn, the atmosphere lacks the flashing planes, and sometimes satellites seem to have fallen asleep. The stars […]

Guest Post: A Glimmer of Good in a Time of War

On the night of January 8, 1970, I was an A-37 attack jet pilot returning to my home base of Bien Hoa after a mission over the Mekong Delta in Vietnam. It was 1:30am as I reduced the power to separate from my leader and then zoomed the aircraft to 20,000 feet so I could […]

Redux: Giving History a Finger

Even at a thousand words, this picture would be way undervalued. But there it was, waiting to be taken (the picture, that is, not the object). So I took, during a visit to Florence, and I wrote, in 2014, and I redux, here, because some images you just can’t get out of your head. The […]