American Bardo
As I read George Saunders’ daring first novel Lincoln in the Bardo recently, I was struck by its strangely close parallels with another memorable and ...
Thinking about Gaia
In this month of Earth Day and marching for science and climate, I’m thinking about Gaia. A hashtag popped up on Twitter last week: #ifonlytheearthcouldspeak ...
Grieving for a whole planet
When I saw the first Star Wars movie, A New Hope, I couldn’t get past that moment when Princess Leia sees her home planet, Alderaan, ...
An Alternate History reading list for this moment
Are we living in an alternate branch of history? I’ve been asking myself that question since waking up the morning of November 9, with the ...
Other Times, Other Worlds—Fran Wilde & Lawrence M. Schoen
I’m excited to be part of All But True’s next author event, “Other Times, Other Worlds,” with two award-winning science fiction authors: Fran Wilde and ...
Ursula K. Le Guin: Telling makes the world
Maria Popova has written on her wonderful website Brain Pickings about Ursula K. Le Guin’s essay on the nature of speech, “Telling is Listening.” This brought ...
Living Tesla’s Dream
Today is the 160th anniversary of Nikola Tesla’s birth. Tesla was a seer of electricity, whose vision of a world transformed with an electric grid ...
The radical leaps of A Wrinkle in Time
I was in sixth grade when I was swept up in the world of A Wrinkle in Time, part of the first generation of girls ...
Tesla in Bankruptcy
On March 18, 1916—one hundred years ago today—the New York World ran an article with the headline: “Tesla No Money Wizard; Swamped by Debts, He ...
Kate Atkinson and quantum physics
Kate Atkinson has now won the Costa Book Award twice in the past three years—for her companion novels, A God in Ruins (2015) and the stunning ...
