Cordyceps, the carpenter ant, and the boundaries of the self – the strange science of zombie fungi
The Middle Passage – a Jungian field guide to finding meaning and transformation in the tumult of midlife.
In the autumn of 1883, a paper in the nation's capital reported that "an Iowa woman has spent 7 years embroidering the solar system on a quilt" — to teach astronomy in an era when women could not attend college. Her story.
The other significant others – wonderful read on living and loving outside the confines of conventional friendship and compulsory coupledom.
Oliver Sacks on how chocolate cast its spell upon humanity, from biochemistry to culture.
A century ago, in the middle of a world war, the artist and philosopher Rockwell Kent spent 7 months on a remote Alaskan island with his young son, and wrote beautifully about wilderness, solitude, and creativity.
George Saunders on storytelling and the antidote to media manipulation.
A stunning poem inspired by Stephen Hawking, who would have been 82 today.
Paul Ford on why interdisciplinarity will win the future. A quarter millennium ago, William Blake nailed it: "The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way… As a man is, so he sees."
A parliament of owls, a murder of crows, an ostentation of peacocks... How bird groupings got their strange and wondrous names (involving a forgotten 15th-century woman and some lovely vintage illustrations by Brian Wildsmith, like the one pictured here).
The young Woody Guthrie's disarming list of New Year's resolutions.
The great Irish poet and philosopher John O'Donohue on beginnings – wonderful read.
The New York Times selects the best sentences of 2023.
Stunning ultraviolet images of Mars captured by NASA's MAVEN spacecraft, offering scientists new understanding of the planet's atmosphere by rendering atmospheric ozone, clouds, and hazes in different colors. How far we've come from Étienne Léopold Trouvelot's pioneering 19th-century depictions.