this is the audio recording of my poem, "empathy is nothing". to read the backstory, please go here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/poem-recording-26177383

“Today is very beautiful — just as bright, just as blue, just as green and as white, and as crimson, as the cherry trees full in bloom, and the half opening peach blossoms, and the grass just…

“Eclectic and satisfying . . . Informative and engaging . . . Sacks writes with his characteristic compassion and attention to detail. . . This final posthumous collection provides one last peek into…

“Lay hold of to-day’s task, and you will not need to depend so much upon to-morrow’s. While we are postponing, life speeds by. Nothing… is ours, except time.”

We’ve wiped out 40 percent of biology on earth in just fifty years,” says Zach Bush, MD. “And yet that Mother Earth keeps reaching out saying: Are you sure you don't want to keep playing? Because we…

How the humble tree became our most powerful visual metaphor for organizing information and distilling our understanding of the world.

A bittersweet serenade to the bidirectional pull of existence.

“Life is mostly an exercise in being something other than what we used to be while remaining fundamentally—and sometimes maddeningly—who we are.”

“Why are you kissing me in the middle of the sentence?!”

“It is still leafing; still there. Mortal though.”

“To the dumb question ‘Why me?’ the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?”

“Eleanor Roosevelt, lean and rangy, wore floral dresses and tucked flowers in the brim of floppy hats perched on top of her wavy hair, but she had a spine as stiff as the steel girder of a sk…

“Yours is a grave and sobering responsibility, but it is also a shining opportunity. You go out into a world where mankind is challenged, as it has never been challenged before, to prove its …

Making sense of the universe for 100 years how do starsform and shine?

From Calcutta’s most macabre prison to the ivory towers of Cambridge, by way of ancient mythology and Einstein.

We are not “patches of life scattered through an infinite sea of non-living substance” but “specks of relative death in an infinite ocean of life.”

The dead are for morticians & butchers

The astrophysicist Janna Levin reflects on the newly unveiled, first-ever photograph of a black hole.

“The climb is personal, a truly human endeavor, and the real expedition pixelates into individuals, not Platonic forms.”

“A work of art is not a piece of fruit lifted from a tree branch: it is a ripening collaboration of artist, receiver, and world.”

Watching the master at work from the other side of the glass.

“It is literature, in the primordial sense, which establishes the context for social and political action in the first place.”