Carl Sagan used this line in Cosmos (1980). The line has, since his death, become one of those quotes that floats around the internet attached to photographs…
Quote source: Brian Cox, Wonders of the Universe, episode “Messengers” (2011).
There is a particular kind of adult who can, in 2026, sit through a two-hour film without once reaching for their phone.
There is a particular kind of low-grade fatigue that almost every adult I know carries, and that almost none of them can identify the source of.
I have, by now, lost count of the number of times I have stepped out of an airport into a city that I had previously only encountered in films and felt, for the first hour or so, slightly dislocated in time.
There is a small social event I have been paying close attention to for about a decade now, because the event has turned out to be the most reliable diagnostic I have ever found for who, in any given conversation, is worth taking seriously.
There is a small social experiment one can perform in any large supermarket parking lot, anywhere in the world.
There has been a particular pattern in twentieth-century science fiction that the wider culture has not, on the available evidence, fully reckoned with, even…
My mother has a younger sister, who I will call my aunt, because she is, and who has been, for as long as I have known her, what the wider family politely refers to as "the eccentric one.
I have been to Tokyo five times in the last decade. I keep going back, partly because the food is the best in the world by almost any metric I can apply to…
I want to write about a small habit I have come to associate, over the last decade or so, with a particular kind of intelligence that the wider culture does not, on the available evidence, fully recognize as intelligence.
I want to write about a small internal shift I have, in the last few years, started noticing in myself, and that I am not yet sure I trust enough to fully describe, but that I think is worth setting down before I lose track of how it actually arrived.
I want to write about a small piece of internal arithmetic that I have, in the last few years, started running about arguments, and that has, in some real way, changed how I conduct most of the disagreements in my adult life.
My father, in the years since he turned about sixty-five, has become a different man than the one who raised me.
My sister and I have been, for about fifteen years now, in a particular kind of estrangement that neither of us, at any point, made any visible decision to enter.
I noticed something last week, on a Sunday afternoon in Bangkok, that I have not been able to put down since.
