Find a heaven within, Rumi had written–and it came back to me now as Ali, the driver and I sat on a platform in the sun, munching on chicken with barberries–and you enter a garden in which “one life is worth more than all of Paradise.” It had

… in January 2020 Greta Thunberg went as far as to specify just eight years [to avert a global castrophe]. Just a few months later, the president of the UN’s General Assembly gave us 11 years to avert a complete social collapse whereupon the planet will be simultaneously burning (unquenchable

… Baba Yaga is also the name used by an Ukrainian aerial reconnaissance unit under the command of Ruslan Mazovetsky, known as “Barmaley.” At the end of Claire Dederer’s Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma two things happen. Dederer admits to her own monstrosity. She’s a drunk. The other thing

I was so struck by this photo of Fritz Haber, I have done a … that thing where a lecturer or speaker shows a slide and then simply says, This is … in this case Fritz Haber. In the case I’m thinking of, it was Martin Heidegger which, in that case

= truth defined by market competition.

What I admire most about science is that it is completely unwilling to accept the many mysteries that surround us: it is stubborn, and wonderfully so. When it comes face to face with the unknown, it whips out a particle accelerator, a telescope, a microscope, and smashes reality to bits,