Patricia Parks at The Millions:
In Vermeer’s Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, the observer is drawn into a simple domestic scene: the titular woman stands illuminated in the light of, we presume, an unseen window. The expression on her face as she reads is perhaps one of surprise, certainly one of concentration. In this vivid, static painting, she seems even more still and more rooted, unmoving though clearly moved by what she is reading. And the observer is similarly absorbed by this intimate moment.
This interpretation, such as it is, is arrived at first through the eyes: the light and color, the posture of the woman and her expression, the singularity of the room. Vermeer’s painting is a touchstone of sorts in Naomi Cohn’s compelling memoir, The Braille Encyclopedia: Brief Essays on Altered Sight. To her, with her very limited ability to see, the story is not in the painting; it is the painting. “Who cares what is on the letter?” she writes. “Look at how Vermeer makes folds with paint. Look at the intensity of his looking, how he chose what to see.”
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JAMIE HOOD: Hello!
When, on January 19, 1939, W.H. Auden boarded at Southampton a ship bound for New York City, he could not have known that he would never live in England again. But some months earlier, he had told his friend Christopher Isherwood that he wanted to settle permanently in the United States. Almost as soon as he arrived in New York, he began to rethink his calling as a poet, and, moreover, to reconsider the social role and function of poetry. (He also began a spiritual pilgrimage that would lead him to embrace the Christian faith of his childhood.)
An important goal for Prothero is to explain how we know what we know so that readers understand how the climate works and why it changes. As such, much attention is given to the numerous lines of evidence on which palaeoclimatology draws. The fossils that show 
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Two-thirds of the world’s food comes today from