Fiction offers more than just food for thought. It offers possibilities. Social media, conversely, offers us shallow moments of vicarious sensation. As something usually less than reportage, and certainly something substantially less than earnest invention, social media generally traffics in distraction where fiction, even in its most banal expressions, asks something more.
Read MoreA REPORT FROM AN ASTEROID, A REPORT FROM THE ROAD
OSIRIS-REx is a shining light in the darkness, a story of how dedicated teams can figure out ways to pull together and do extraordinary things despite obstacles.
Read MoreCLEAR-EYED MEMORIES OF DARKENING SKIES
It’s always in retrospect when we discover the moments in our lives that matter. Life experienced in real time doesn’t easily enable us to contextualize our feelings or the relevance of experience. Only memory and its academic sibling history grant lasting gravitas to events, or sentimentality, or sadness, or joy to events.
Read MoreTHE SURVIVAL INVENTION
How did those who came before manage to endure? We retell and retell and retell, the stories preserving information as much has they preserve motivation.
Read MoreTHERE'S NO PLACE LIKE HOME
But once you know where you come from, challenge yourself to range outward and learn what’s going on elsewhere. Those explorations will inevitable make you more aware of the unique attributes of your own origin, but they will also make you a more powerful creator.
Read MoreTHE SEEDS OF OUR BETTER SELVES
Humanity cannot really claim a higher order of evolution until it overcomes its first-order tendencies to suppress, restrict, and ultimately destroy.
Read MoreMY EVENING WITH CHARLES AZNAVOUR
His special thing—that unusual, sparkling, saturated thing that gives him gravitas and value—is a profound urgency about not giving up on life, on romance, on love.
Read MoreTHANKSGIVING 2017
Wherever the holiday finds you, you’re obviously reading this, which therefore means you’re alive. That’s not something to forget, or waste.
Read MoreVIRUS
Like a virus, an idea doesn’t look like much without the context of the place and time where it interacts with the world.
Read MoreBEING MOVED
Soldier, student, seer: it doesn’t matter. Looking into the void we can't help but marvel, ponder, feel something shared and private at the same time.
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