Reading Time: < 1 minute Heat makes a rude appearance, Announcing itself in a paroxysm of fire. Homeostasis, that elusive aspiration, has been yoked by the tectonic shift of seasons. It is this announcement that propelled the insulated crust into the surface, met by disagreeable forces challenging the delicate reconstruction of its nucleus. Dry air charges with daggers, piercing the […]
meaning
Posted inFilm/TV
True cosmic horror: Three bleak stories search for meaning in the void of space
Reading Time: 7 minutes Some of the best science fiction illuminates our stark reality: We are here now, in this present moment, and we have a choice to live, and grow, and learn, and love. Or to give up on all that and destroy ourselves and each other. The scenario is not great, but the choice seems obvious.
Posted inPinn Drop with Anthony Pinn
Small creatures and deep connections | Sasha Sagan
Anthony Pinn kicks off his new podcast with Sasha Sagan, author of For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World. Daughter of astronomer/educator Carl Sagan and writer/producer Ann Druyan, Sasha was raised with a sense of awe and wonder about the majesty of the universe, learning to see science […]
Posted inMeaning & Purpose
Eight billion of us: What does that mean?
Reading Time: 4 minutes November 15 is the UN’s estimated date for the eight billionth person to join the living human species. We might have hit that number a few days prior, or a few weeks ago. We might meet it tomorrow, or the day after. But some of we eight billion really like the feel of concrete dates. […]
Posted inMeaning & Purpose
Dying out loud
Reading Time: 3 minutes A few weeks ago I played with an octopus. It was not in some water park or controlled aquarium. It was in the wild. It was in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Hawaii. It was quite a moment. I’m all about the moments, because I feel like that’s really all we have. You […]
Posted inArt
‘…with hope that this assemblage of rubble would become a shrine…’
Reading Time: 9 minutes What began as a practical solution to a problem in my Chicago neighborhood became a public act of meaning-making and a secular memorial.
Posted inMeaning & Purpose
Building a ‘House of Light’: Lessons from Mary Oliver on meaning and spirituality
Reading Time: 2 minutes As I feathered through the pages of Mary Oliver’s House of Light, I noted that I was not the first to do so. My library copy nears the age of 43; an old-fashioned due date table indicates that the first reader visited the poetry collection on August 16, 1990. And people say time machines don’t […]
Posted inCulture
The end of ‘trump,’ or how to wreck a perfectly good word
Reading Time: 4 minutes An article co-written by Jonathan MS Pearce and Bert Bigelow Fifty years ago, I was an avid bridge player, and a member of the American Contract Bridge League (ACBL). I never made it to Life Master, but I accumulated enough Master Points to qualify for lesser titles like Junior Master. Here is a brief definition […]
Posted inCulture
It’s times like these when hope is hardest to find—and when it’s needed most
Reading Time: 6 minutes To be progressive and politically engaged this summer is to absorb one blow after another, with more in the offing. The demise of Roe v. Wade. Severe limits slapped onto the EPA’s ability to combat climate change through regulation of power-plant carbon emissions. The specter of Republican-dominated state legislatures being turned loose to administer federal […]
Posted inMeaning & Purpose
The work we do, with the time we have
Reading Time: 6 minutes When I was a wee sprog, I dreamed big. I was going to be a physics professor, working on tricky cosmology problems related to heat and expansion. (I was the precocious twit reading Feynman and Hawking at twelve and, like any twelve-year-old, feeling confident that I understood everything because I’d read a few pop-sci texts.) […]