How rare, how perfect. But perhaps this safe, quiet space can be seen as a gift allowing us the opportunity to break out of old patterns, to think generously and create dangerously.
Lynn Margulis, biologist and Distinguished Professor of Geosciences, composed a grand and powerful view of the living and the non-living. Integrating the work of obscure Russian scientists, DNA pulled from cell organelles, computer-generated daisies, and the hindguts of termites, her vision was wider in scope and more profound in depth than any other coherent scientific world view. At the time of her death on November 22nd, 2011, it was and is a vision that remains misunderstood and misconstrued by many scientists.
No one could have foreseen just how much the 2009 MacArthur award would benefit not only Danticat’s work and her family but also the country of her birth. Just months later, a 7.0 earthquake killed approximately 316,000 people, injured 300,000 and left 1,000,000 homeless in her native country.
“What pattern connects the crab to the lobster,” muses anthropologist, philosopher, and systems theorist Gregory Bateson in An Ecology of Mind (2011), filmmaker Nora Bateson’s award-winning tribute to her father. “And the orchid to the primrose,” he continues, “and all the four of them to me? And me to you?”
My mother is dying. There are shuffling noises overhead coming from her bedroom. She has cancer, and her death is imminent. I am her only child. We never liked each other.
I sensed that he felt the book to be his intellectual last will and testament, and in summing up a life's work, he had also summoned up the ghost of his famous father and the shadow of inferiority it had cast across his life. Gregory Bateson had resolved to prove himself to the scientific patriarchy...
Up on his platform he was still the timeless, majestic Mirko Pindar, ascending to the dangers of the sky, afterward autographing the T-shirts of young girls (usually, but not always, disappointed to see his age up close), selling off old photos of Mara and himself, then going back to his motel alone (but not always) to relax with a liter of slivovitz.
Rumors, oddities, and natural wonders were of great interest to the Medici Granducal entourage. Even the most ludicrous and bizarre had serious import. For instance, the papal excommunication of swarm of insects and reptiles that invaded in Rome in 1540; the luncheon enjoyed by indigenous Floridians in 1565, whose main dish consisted of the three French soldiers they had captured...
I’m envisioning a “power triangle” between America, Iran, and Turkey suggesting that peace in the Middle East could be possible as these countries have the means to achieve this.
WRR: You are joining us in a new era, that of the web. How do you feel about the fact that we are conducting this interview via email?
DICKENS: Electric communication will never be a substitute for the face of someone who with their soul encourages another person to be brave and true. (“The Signalman.” Short Story)