Uranus Is Highbrow Over the years, we’ve learned a lot of interesting and off-color things about Uranus. Uranus is tilted. Uranus stinks. Uranus is cold. Uranus even rains diamonds. We’ve only visited Uranus once, when Voyager 2 whooshed by on its way out of the solar system. Because of all these bizarre attributes of Uranus, we decided we’re going to […]
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The Violet Crown City of light, with thy violet crown, beloved of the poets, thou art the bulwark of Greece. –Pindar, Fragment 76 The drawing-rooms of one of the most magnificent private residences in Austin are ablaze of lights. Carriages line the streets in front, and from gate to doorway is spread a velvet carpet,
The Red Queen Hypothesis Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. –Red Queen, Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass Undoubtedly, one of the greatest scientific revolutions transpired in the mid-1800s, as Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace advanced the theory of evolution. Borne time and again
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Karamazov Walk “From the house of my childhood I have brought nothing but precious memories, for there are no memories more precious than those of early childhood in one’s first home. And that is almost always so if there is any love and harmony in the family at all. Indeed, precious memories may remain even
The Mad Hatterpillar In 1820, Washington Irving popularized the character of the Headless Horseman, a ghost who terrorizes the countryside looking for his missing head. Though the myth reaches farther into time – Irish folklore, for example, features the Dullahan (“dark man”) who carries his head by horseback – Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hallow destined this character
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Odysseus Few literary characters rise to a level of timelessness in which their stories survive millennia. Still, fewer characters see their names become eponyms folded into multiple languages. One such gargantuan of the page is Homer’s Odysseus. If you’re into the Romans or the Irish, you might know him better as Ulysses. Though the champion
Mocha Dick Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. — Herman Melville, Moby-Dick Instead of projecting his spout obliquely forward, and puffing with a short, convulsive effort, accompanied by a snorting noise, as usual with
Transylvania and the Count In 1897, Irish author Bram Stoker unleashed Dracula upon the world. The titular Count was not the first vampire in literature – that trend extends at least to the first half of the 18th century – but he is the most famous. Because of Stoker, we have dozens of adaptations of his
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The Sirens of Titan Join me on a trip toward the outer reaches of our solar system. On the voyage, we’ll mix metaphors from two fantastic authors. I think the conflation we’ll make might be acceptable to one of them. Maybe both! In 1959, Kurt Vonnegut published his second novel. Setting the tone for his
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Mount Doom and the Crags of Mordor In our previous issue, we explored Mont Blanc, Western Europe’s High Point and the tallest peak in the Alps. After visiting the “White Mountain,” it seems fitting in this Halloween season to travel next to a place with a diametrically opposed name. Translated from the native language of
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