Lewis is a small place, but its story is immense. Four hundred and forty thousand years ago, ice, in places almost a half-mile thick, covered this land, turning the Outer Hebrides into something like northern Greenland today.
There are two enormous amethyst geodes at the entrance to the American Museum of Natural History’s new Halls of Gems and Minerals. And they are wonders, catalysts to the poetic as well as scientific imagination, doorways to the infinite vastness of the universe…
How many millions have climbed the Great Staircase since Tiepolo’s The Triumph of Marius was unrolled from its giant storage drum in Saranac Lake, New York, in 1965, and shipped downstate to The Met? And what do they see when they look up at that dazzling scene tumbling toward them?
The lesson from all this is to be as prepared as possible for the consequences of making arguments in public and to be ready to respond.
Los Angeles, 1968. Everything in California is shiny, bright, and new. The parking lots and motels, the thrilling blinking neon, the unsuspected colors of night…
Imagine for a moment that you are the beetle. Not the woman in the loft with the low-tech gadgets and the trippy helmet and the exotic pet and the minimalist website and the starring role in the multispecies art project. Imagine instead that you are the beetle.
As more and more research is demonstrating, “nonnative” is an ideological grab bag of a category whose members are varied in their impacts and diverse in their contributions.
“This,” says Robinson, “is the airborne vessel on which the magician Bladud flew to London where he crashed on Ludgate Hill, the last stone of a circle that stood on the site of St. Paul’s. … This is the stone that Jack Cade, the Kentish rebel, struck with his staff when he took possession of the city.”
A stone can endure, it can change, it can harm, it can heal. It can make you rich, it can make you poor, it can become an enemy, a friend, and a teacher. It can carry your memories and your dreams. It can build empires and bury cities. It can reveal the history of the universe. It can open and close the gates of philosophy. It can change the course of nature. It can change its own nature. It can empty the world of time.
The anti-immigrant sentiment sweeping the country, from draconian laws in Arizona to armed militias along the Mexican border, has taken many Americans by surprise. It shouldn’t—nativism runs deep in the United States.
For the first time in more than a decade, New York’s beekeepers are claiming their summer perches on the city’s rooftops.
Jews are still struggling with the identifications bequeathed by the Nazis, damned to judge and be judged in terms of loss, guilt, trauma, and redemption. Hunted in the past, haunted in the present.
On the way to the cricket fight, Mr. Wu slipped us a piece of paper. It looked like a shopping list. “More numbers,” said Michael.
Six stones to get lost with. An enumeration on the anniversary of the eruption of Mount St. Helens.
What does a relational local knowledge look like? Much might be gained by rethinking local knowledge and its production as a form of intimacy.
It was Amazonian butterflies and beetles that turned Henry Walter Bates into the leading entomologist of his day.
