Cordyceps, the carpenter ant, and the boundaries of the self – the strange science of zombie fungi

Moonlight and the magic of the unnecessary

Our task at midlife is to be strong enough to relinquish the ego-urgencies of the first half and open ourselves to a greater wonder.

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.

While we weaken friendships by expecting too little of them, we undermine romantic relationships by expecting too much of them.

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 cloud is a spell against indifference, an emblem of the water cycle that makes this planet a living world capable of trees and tenderness, a great cosmic gasp at the improbability that such a world exists, that across the cold expanse of space-time, strewn with billions upon billions of other star systems, there is nothing like it as far as we yet know.

On clouds and Rachel Carson

These are the times in life — when nothing happens — but in quietness the soul expands.

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.

Every well-thought-out rebuttal to dogma, every scrap of intelligent logic, every absurdist reduction of some bullying stance is the antidote. Every request for the clarification of the vague, every poke at smug banality, every pen stroke in a document under revision is the antidote… We still have the ability to rise up… keep reminding ourselves that representations of the world are never the world itself.

George Saunders on storytelling and the antidote to media manipulation.

“Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity
we once were?”

A stunning poem inspired by Stephen Hawking, who would have been 82 today.

All you have to do is look at a tree—any tree will do—to see how badly our disciplines serve us. Evolutionary theory, botany, geography, physics, hydrology, countless poems, paintings, essays, and stories—all trying to make sense of the tree. We need them all, the whole fragile, interdependent ecosystem. No one has got it right yet.

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).

Stay glad.
Keep hoping machine running.
Love everybody.
Make up your mind.

The young Woody Guthrie’s disarming list of New Year’s resolutions.

Our very life here depends directly on continuous acts of beginning.

The great Irish poet and philosopher John O'Donohue on beginnings – wonderful read.

“We were never promised any of it — this world of cottonwoods and clouds — when the Big Bang set the possible in motion. And yet here we are, atoms with consciousness, each of us a living improbability forged of chaos and dead stars. Children of chance, we have made ourselves into what we are — creatures who can see a universe of beauty in the feather of a bird and can turn a blind eye to each other’s suffering, creatures capable of the Benedictus and the bomb.”

The New York Times selects the best sentences of 2023.