illustration

Something About the Sky: Rachel Carson’s Lost Serenade to the Science of the Clouds, Found and Illustrated by Artist Nikki McClure

A version of this essay appeared in The New York Times Book Review. A cloud is a spell against indifference, an emblem of the water cycle that makes this planet a living world capable of trees and tenderness, a great cosmic gasp at the improbability that such a world exists, that across the cold expanse of spacetime strewn with billions upon billions of other star systems, there is nothing like it as far as we yet know. Clouds are almost as old as this world, born when primordial volcanos first exhaled the chemistry of the molten planet into the sky,… read article …

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Maira Kalman on How to Live with Remorse and Wrest from It Defiant Joy in Living

Each time we have tried to elevate ourselves above the other animals by claiming singular possession of some faculty, we have been humbled otherwise: Language, it turns out, is not ours alone, nor is the use of tools, nor is music. Elephants grieve, octopuses remember and predict, crows hold grudges. Perhaps one day this too will be snatched from us, but for now there seems to be one tumult of being pulsating in the human breast alone: the capacity to be sorry, to feel the soul-ache of remorse as the penitent past fangs the flesh of the present. How to… read article …

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The Fairy Tale Tree

Creativity is at bottom the combinatorial work of memory and imagination. All of our impressions, influences, and experiences — every sight we have ever seen, every book read, every landscape walked, every love loved — become seeds for ideas we later combine and recombine, largely unconsciously, into creations we call our own. The most wondrous thing about these seeds is that, when they first fall into the fallow ground of the mind, we have no sense of what they will bloom into years, decades, and selves later, what alchemic cross-pollination will take place between them and other seeds in the… read article …

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Favorite Children’s Books of 2023

Tender and poetic reckonings with friendship, fear, love, solitude, black holes, deep time, and the interconnectedness of life. …

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Favorite Books of 2023

To look back on a year of reading is to be handed a clear mirror of your priorities and passions, of the questions that live in you and the reckonings that keep you up at night. While the literature of the present comprises only a tiny fraction of my own reading, here are a handful of books published this year that moved me with their tendrils of timelessness, with their questions and their consolations — selections neither exhaustive nor universal, as subjective as a shade of blue. THE HALF KNOWN LIFE “The mind is its own place, and in it… read article …

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How the Sea Came to Be: An Illustrated Singsong Celebration of the Evolution of Life on Our Pale Blue Dot

“Who has known the ocean? Neither you nor I, with our earth-bound senses,” Rachel Carson wrote in the pioneering 1937 essay that invited the human imagination into the science and splendor of the marine world for the first time — a world then more mysterious than the Moon, a world that makes of Earth the Pale Blue Dot that it is. In the near-century since, we have made great strides in illuminating the wonderland of the sea — from the birth of sonar and the revelations of the first submersibles to our ongoing discoveries of astonishing sea creatures. And yet… read article …

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Wonder Beyond Why: The Majesty and Mystery of the Birds-of-Paradise

“To go all the way from a clone of archaebacteria, in just 3.7 billion years, to the B-Minor Mass and the Late Quartets, deserves a better technical term for the record than randomness,” the poetic scientist Lewis Thomas wrote in his forgotten masterpiece of perspective. This is the great astonishment: that we come from a lineage of chance events stretching all the way back to the Big Bang, that however precisely we may trace the causality of the forces and phenomena leading to the improbable fact of us, still the most powerful and enchanting experiences of our lives — those… read article …

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In the Dark: A Lyrical Illustrated Invitation to Find the Light Behind the Fear

The mind is a camera obscura constantly trying to render an image of reality on the back wall of consciousness through the pinhole of awareness, its aperture narrowed by our selective attention, honed on our hopes and fears. In consequence, the projection we see inside the dark chamber is not raw reality but our hopes and fears magnified — a rendering not of the world as it is but as we are: frightened, confused, hopeful creatures trying to make sense of the mystery that enfolds us, the mystery that we are. This reality-warping begins as the frights and fantasies of… read article …

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Alone Together: An Illustrated Celebration of the Art of Shared Solitude

“One can never be alone enough to write,” Susan Sontag lamented in her diary. “Oh comforting solitude, how favorable thou art to original thought!” the founding father of neuroscience exulted in considering the ideal environment for creative breakthrough. All creative people, however public or performative their work may be, yearn for that contemplative space where the mind quiets and the spirit quickens. The ongoing challenge of the creative life is how to balance the outward sharing of one’s gift with the inward stewardship of the soul from which that gift springs. How to master that delicate balance is what Dutch… read article …

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A Tender Illustrated Celebration of the Many Languages of Love

That one mind can reach out from its lonely cave of bone and touch another, express its joys and sorrows to another — this is the great miracle of being alive together. The object of human communication is not the exchange of information but the exchange of understanding. If we are lucky enough, if we are attentive enough, communication then becomes a system for the transfer of tenderness. That we have invented so many forms of it — the language of words, the language of music, the language of flowers — is a testament to our elemental need for this… read article …

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Starlings and the Magic of Murmurations: A Stunning Watercolor Celebration of One of Earth’s Living Wonders

Biking back to my rented cottage from CERN one autumn evening, having descended into the underworld of matter for a visit to the world’s largest high-energy particle collider, a sight stopped me up short on the shore of Lake Geneva: In the orange sky over the orange water, a million particles were swarming in unison without colliding. Except they were not particles — they were birds. Millions of them. A murmuration of starlings — swarm intelligence at its most majestic, emergence incarnate, a living reminder that the universe is “nothing but a vast, self-organizing, complex system, the emergent properties of… read article …

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Yellow Butterfly: A Moving Wordless Story About War, Hope, and Keeping the Light Alive

In his little-known correspondence with Freud about war and human nature, Einstein observed that every great moral and spiritual leader in the history of our civilization has shared “the great goal of the internal and external liberation of man* from the evils of war” as Freud insisted that the more we understand human psychology, the more we can “deduce a formula for an indirect method of eliminating war.” In her timeless treatise on the building blocks of peace, the pioneering crystallographer and peace activist Kathleen Lonsdale located that formula in the moral education of our young — in teaching children,… read article …

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A Stone Is a Story: An Illustrated Love Letter to Deep Time and Earth’s Memory

We are denizens of an enormous pebble drifting through the cosmic ocean of pure spacetime — a planet made a world largely by its rockiness. Rock gave us mountains and beaches, bridges and kitchen countertops, gave us the first Promethean fire that sparked civilization. A rock is a reliquary of the story of life on Earth — the open face of a canyon, its lined strata exposing evolutionary epochs; the fossil undusted on the forest trail, embodying the haunting truth that “we are all potential fossils still carrying within our bodies the crudities of former existences.” This, perhaps, is what… read article …

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I Touched the Sun: A Tender Illustrated Parable About How to Find and Bear Your Inner Light

“One discovers the light in darkness, that is what darkness is for; but everything in our lives depends on how we bear the light,” James Baldwin wrote in one of his finest, least known essays. In his exquisite memoir of the search for inner light, the blind resistance hero Jacques Lusseyran wrote in the same era: “Nothing in the world, not even what I saw inside myself with closed eyelids, was outside this great miracle of light.” That search comes ablaze with uncommon tenderness in I Touched the Sun (public library) by musician and graphic novelist Leah Hayes — the… read article …

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Doris: A Watercolor Serenade to the Courage of Authenticity and the Art of Connection

“There is no insurmountable solitude,” Pablo Neruda asserted in his stirring Nobel Prize acceptance speech. “All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence in order to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance.” The self-permission to dance into our authenticity, however clumsily, however lonesomely, may be the supreme achievement of life. A bright celebration of that self-permission, and its profound rewards, comes in Doris (public library) by Sarah Jacoby. Told in tender watercolors luminous with life, it… read article …

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Little Black Hole: A Tender Cosmic Fable About How to Live with Loss

Right this minute, people are making plans, making promises and poems, while at the center of our galaxy a black hole with the mass of four billion suns screams its open-mouth kiss of oblivion. Someday it will swallow every atom that ever touched us and every datum we ever produced, swallow Euclid’s postulates and the Goldberg Variations, calculus and Leaves of Grass. When black holes first emerged from the mathematics of relativity, Einstein himself wavered on whether or not they could be real — he struggled to imagine that nature could produce so menacing a thing, that spacetime could bend… read article …

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How to Say Goodbye: An Illustrated Field Guide to Accompanying a Loved One at the End of Life

“If you don’t know what to say, start by saying that… That opens things up.” …

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The Wondrous Birds of the Himalayas and the Forgotten Victorian Woman Whose Illustrations Rewilded the Western Imagination

Bridging Blake and Darwin with a single-hair brush. …

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Bunny & Tree: A Tender Wordless Parable of Friendship and the Improbable Saviors That Make Life Livable

Traversing the landscape of life on the wings of trust. …

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How the Octopus Came to Earth: Stunning 19th-Century French Chromolithographs of Cephalopods

The art-science that captured the wonder of some of “the most brilliant productions of Nature.” …

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Stunning Century-Old Illustrations of Tibetan Fairy Tales from the Artist Who Created Bambi

Soulful art from stories that speak “to the childhood of all times and all races.” …

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Stunning 200-Year-Old French Illustrations of Exotic, Endangered, and Extinct Birds

From peacocks to penguins, a winged menagerie of wonder. …

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Radical Compassion and the Seeds of Change: The Dalai Lama’s Ethical and Ecological Philosophy for the Next Generation, Illustrated

“We are all interconnected in the universe, and from this, universal responsibility arises… Everyone has the responsibility to develop a happier world.” …

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Bear: A Soulful Illustrated Meditation on Life with and Liberation from Depression

Inside the silent scream of life. …

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If You Fail at Love

Consolation for our learned brokenness on the path to healing. …

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