A Clockwork Orange was not Burgess’s best work, though it was the one that made his reputation beyond the world of books and bookmen. He was extraordinarily productive. He wrote more than 30 novels, along with short stories, poetry, children’s books, two volumes of autobiography, lives of Shakespeare, Hemingway and DH Lawrence, books on linguistics, on music, two studies of Joyce, translations, scores of introductions to the work of others, and countless reviews, a selection of which were published in book form under the apt title Urgent Copy.
And then there was music. It was his first love, and to the end of his life he strove to present himself to the world as a serious composer, though the world consistently turned a deaf ear to his efforts. Writing, therefore, was for him a second-best career, which did not, however, prevent him from applying to it all the weight of his prodigious energies.
For about two months each year, fisherman Faustino Mauloko da Cunha and his son Zacarias spend most of their days in a dugout canoe out at sea in the South Pacific Ocean.
Armed with binoculars and a telephoto camera, they watch the cobalt waters for one of its great treasures - pygmy blue whales.
When there is a sighting, it’s all systems go.
During socialism in Bulgaria, Santa Claus—or “Grandfather Frost,” as we called him—arrived on New Year’s Eve instead of Christmas because the communist government had replaced all religious holidays with secular ones. The Christians did that to the pagans after the adoption of Christianity so this, it seemed, was some twisted historical payback.
I knew that there was no Grandfather Frost in reality because my father had trained me in science and logical thinking. Once, when I was six, prompted by my question, “Where do humans come from?” he embarked on a long, detailed explanation of Darwin’s theory of evolution. We were walking through an old city park on a warm autumn afternoon. The trees were turning yellow and red and formed a colorful tunnel around us. I had wanted a simple, easy answer. But that was never the case with my father. I listened patiently as I always did when he spoke, eager to catch all the details and follow the logical explanation and tried to keep up with his pace, taking two or three steps for every one of his, for he was tall and a fast walker. But as he spoke of things I couldn’t comprehend, my mind wandered to the fallen chestnuts and acorns and how I wanted to collect some to make tiny animals and people with toothpicks as we had done in art class. I didn’t catch the end of the lesson of evolution or what had happened to Darwin. I don’t remember this part but when my father finished, I allegedly said, “You can say what you want but I know I came from my mother’s stomach and not from a monkey.” This story occasionally came up at family gatherings and caused the adults to laugh uproariously and me to redden with embarrassment. I felt shy because I became the center of attention, yet I also craved such attention.
After many delays, budget crises, and political battles, the James Webb Space Telescope finally followed Hubble into space in December 2021, and by the time it began to open its multifaceted, infrared-detecting eyes in mid-2022, it was already clear that it was not only going to be a worthy successor to the Hubble but surpass it in ways far beyond expectations — a fact brought home by Webb’s updated take on Hubble’s famous “Pillars of Creation” image. Science writer Richard Panek’s “Pillars of Creation: How the James Webb Telescope Unlocked the Secrets of the Cosmos” lays out the brave new world of the just-dawned Webb era and how the instrument is already opening fresh astronomical and cosmological vistas.