Urmila Chadayammuri in Nature:
“Between the scale of atoms and the scale of stars,” Maria Popova writes in the prologue to her daring book Traversal, “between the time of mayflies and the time of mountains, we exist as proteins lit up with purpose.” And she sets out to investigate just what this purpose is.
Popova is the acclaimed essayist behind the popular blog The Marginalian (formerly known as Brain Pickings). What started as an eclectic weekly newsletter sent out to inspire her colleagues’ creativity has ended up in the archives of the US Library of Congress as a gem of cultural heritage.
In Traversal, this incredibly interdisciplinary exploration of knowledge and meaning gets to grow across 600 pages. Whether she is writing about colonialist explorer James Cook, crystallographer Dorothy Hodgkin or novelist Mary Shelley, about poetry, abolitionism or paint, Popova has a way of weaving one story into the next as if the boundaries between disciplines, cultures and centuries do not exist.
It is one of those books so ambitious in scope and form that it can only succeed — or fail — spectacularly. Traversal succeeds.
More here.
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Desire is a curious thing. Some desires are easily satisfied—they pass quickly after they are successfully gratified, and rarely intrude into our consciousness. A lazy afternoon at the beach is a pleasure, but one we only seek occasionally. Other desires are insatiable. For those rewards, the thirst for more persists no matter how much access we get. Even after gratifying such desires, the longing barely fades—or if there is any relief it’s short-lived. Indulgence of such desires can lead to an escalation of the hunger, rather than contented satisfaction. This is not always a negative thing—to give and receive love is an example of a desire we never tire of—but insatiable desires are hard to moderate.
Dred Scott first went to trial to sue for his freedom in 1847. Ten years later, after a decade of appeals and court reversals, his case was finally brought before the United States Supreme Court. In what is perhaps the most infamous case in its history, the court decided that all people of African ancestry — slaves as well as those who were free — could never become citizens of the United States and therefore could not sue in federal court. The court also ruled that the federal government did not have the power to prohibit slavery in its territories. Scott, needless to say, remained a slave.
The Romantics were Tennyson’s immediate predecessors, so perhaps it is unsurprising that Holmes returns to the theme in his new book, “
One night John and I go to Tribeca, to a small gallery space on Franklin Street, to see Joseph Cornell’s masterpiece, Rose Hobart (1936), a nineteen-minute collage film made by splicing and reordering segments from East of Borneo (1931), a B-film starring Rose Hobart and Charles Bickford, along with an educational nature film of an eclipse. A few days earlier, John called and told me that he had read that there was going to be a screening of Cornell’s film, just as he had first shown it at the Julien Levy Gallery in December 1936, projected through a blue-tinted lens at a slowed down speed consistent with silent films. John thought it would be interesting to see Rose Hobart as Cornell first conceived of it.
As an evolutionary biologist who studies sex and relationships, I’m fascinated by these two truths. We humans make romantic commitments to each other – and some also break those commitments by cheating.
N
Although Thiebaud also painted sprawling mesas, towering cityscapes, and sun-drenched coastlines (inspiring its own California license plate), it’s the depictions of food that are unmistakably his. The barely garnished hot dogs of state fairs and the decadent milkshakes of soda shops have all been immortalized in his artworks. When Thiebaud was just starting out painting, he spent a year in New York City; there he befriended Willem de Kooning who 
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Born into slavery on Maryland’s Eastern Shore in 1822, Tubman was named Araminta by her enslaved parents, Ben and Harriet (Rit) Ross. Nearly killed at the age of 13 by a blow to her head, “Minty” recovered and grew strong and determined to be free. Changing her name to Harriet upon her marriage to freeman John Tubman in 1844, she escaped five years later when her enslaver died and she was to be sold. One hundred dollars was offered for her capture. Vowing to return to bring her family and friends to freedom, she spent the next ten years making about 13 trips into Maryland to rescue them. She also gave instructions to about 70 more who found their way to freedom independently.
Laura Oliveira fell in love with swimming at 70. She won her first competition three decades later. 
In Donkey Kong, Jumpman was a carpenter with a hammer. But now, what with all the pipes, in the endearingly literal narrative logic of early video games, it made sense for Mario to be a plumber. “There were several reasons why we used pipes,” Miyamoto told me in a 2020 interview. “They were perfect for the mechanic in Mario Bros., where enemies disappearing at the bottom of the screen would appear again from the top after a short time; they had this comic book feel about them where they’d bulge and have something come out of them; and then there was the fact that I would always see them on my way to work.” (On his route to the office, Miyamoto would walk through a residential area that had some construction work going on, revealing drainage pipes sticking out of the walls.)