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 […]
Astronomy
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
This post first ran on Dec. 31, 2010, though with a different main image, and it has run just about every New Year’s Eve since then. Back in the day, the lead image was a close-up of the crown of the 2009 pole. That image still appears as part of this essay, only farther down. […]
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 […]
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 […]