Fairy tales take both evil and goodness quite seriously. In other words, they are truthful. As Madeleine L’Engle claimed, “The world of fairy tale, fantasy, myth, is inimical to the secular world, and in total opposition to it, for it is interested not in limited laboratory proofs, but in truth.” And in their embrace of truth, fairy tales wrestle with darkness and end in triumph. But are we willing to tell children the truth by reading them fairy tales, as Flannery O’Connor did to her playmates? It seems that these days we are more comfortable if we alter them either by softening the darkness in the story or, as we see in much young adult literature, rejecting the possibility of happily ever after.
The ancient Greeks wanted to believe that the universe could be described in its entirety using only whole numbers and the ratios between them — fractions, or what we now call rational numbers. But this aspiration was undermined when they considered a square with sides of length 1, only to find that the length of its diagonal couldn’t possibly be written as a fraction.
The inability of empirical sciences to figure out why and how matter gives rise to the experiences of consciousness has recently rekindled an interest in panpsychism. So have developments in the fields of neuroscience, psychology, and quantum physics.
In ways sometimes delightful, sometimes funny, sometimes shocking, he uses the inexplicable mystery of the mountain to show that our own lives are every bit as inexplicable and mysterious as any magic mountain. His story starts with an earthquake, and builds down to an entrancing whisper.
Robert Thorogood’s understanding of human nature and keen eye for hilarious dialog permeate this clever mystery novel, as the Marlow Murder Club once again set out to trap a cunning killer while solving their own far less life-and-death—but just as personally important—problems.
Marcelo Gleiser, a distinguished scientist and world-renowned thinker, has always given his books a strong interdisciplinary slant. The Dawn of a Mindful Universe: A Manifesto for Humanity’s Future (2023), however, is unique, because its purpose is to help us understand not only how the world is but also how it should be. Indeed, as the book’s subtitle suggests, Gleiser uses his wide-ranging interdisciplinary reflection on the evolution of science to derive a political “manifesto” (in the broadest and noblest sense of the term) addressed to all the inhabitants of “Earth, the planet that makes our story possible,” to which, as to a person of flesh and blood, the book is dedicated.
As Valosik charts the evolution of women swimmers as both performers and athletes, the specter of the mermaid—a hypersexualized figure with supernatural allure—looms large over both trajectories. Along the way, Valosik interrogates the porous boundary between sport and spectacle, a thin line that women’s swimming, in particular, has always navigated. A competitive synchronized swimmer herself, Valosik balked when she learned that the use of goggles is prohibited while competing, on purely aesthetic grounds: “Are we athletes first or are we performers?” she wonders. “Is what we are doing a sport or is it entertainment?”
This isn’t a historical survey of gardening, much less a practical guide, so much as an inquiry into the idea of the garden — its history and poetics, its relationship to sex, imagination and power.