explore-blog:

Monday, April 24, in Brooklyn: The Universe in Verse – an evening of poems celebrating great scientists and scientific discoveries, read by beloved actors, writers, and musicians (including Rosanne Cash, Amanda Palmer, Brandon Stanton of Humans of New York, Tavi Gevinson, Jad Abumrad of Radiolab, Sam Beam of Iron & Wine, astrophysicist Janna Levin, poet Elizabeth Alexander, and more) – essentially an elaborate protest against the defunding of science and the arts: All proceeds from tickets are being donated to the Academy of American Poets and the Natural Resources Defense Council.

More information here. 

Please help spread the word. 

I wanna goooo.
(But I can’t because schoolnight and exhausted and logistical impossibilities), and this is no longer within biking distance).

How did it all happen and why….

Rob Cowen, Where Nature Gets to Run Amok

underpaidgenius:

Beautiful prose about connection with the scrub scraps of wildness just around the corner in suburbia:

I discovered my edgeland a few years ago on New Year’s Eve after moving back to my home county of Yorkshire in the north of England following a decade living in London. My wife, a London girl, had chosen the town of Harrogate, 180 miles north, because of its access to theaters, cultural pulse and coffee shops. But I’d visited it only a handful of times. We had planned to relocate together, but her job then kept her in the capital, so I found myself suddenly living alone in a strange town, in a strange house, in the depths of winter. All the maps I’d navigated my life by seemed redundant; my world was stacked up in boxes in an empty hallway.

Looking for the nearest open space was instinctive, but to my surprise it didn’t turn out to be one of the ornate gardens or parks of Harrogate’s center but a patch of vacant land a mile the other way, strewn with pylons and threaded with the varicose vein of an ancient river. Like me, the edgeland seemed caught between states, lost somewhere between past and present, and I felt an immediate sense of alignment with it.

[…]

To walk into such places daily is to be delivered into the possibility of escape — from ourselves, our fears and worries and the increasing madness of this human world. To do so reminds us that we are part of a greater and more beautiful planet than we often take the time to remember. And right now we need that as surely as we need anything.

Edgeland.

I love the word.

Rob Cowen, Where Nature Gets to Run Amok

mintteawithhoneyandlemon:

PEOPLE ARE ON THE STREETS IN ISTANBUL AND ARE PROTESTING AGAINST THE REFERENDUM !!! PLEASE SPREAD AWARENESS!! PLEASE BE AS LOUD AS YOU ALL WERE WHEN TRUMP WON !! DONT LET A DEMOCRATIC COUNTRY FALL INTO PIECES!!

What happened in Turkey is absolutely heartbreaking.
What’s even worse, and speaks to the credit of the Turks is that he didn’t even win despite the already uneven playing field, and just changed the rules at the last moment when he saw he might be losing.

I will never belong in this office. Everyone likely thinks I am antisocial but I don’t think I’ve ever worked anywhere where I just couldn’t connect with anyone.
Actually made an effort to go out for lunch with coworkers (oysters!) instead of hunkering down at my desk with bento as usual, and just couldn’t bring myself up to laughing at sex jokes and witticisms directed at the waiter (“let me know if you have any more questions – Yes! Where is our food? Hahaha”).
I haven’t gone anywhere, haven’t seen anything and have not even read anything worthy of contributing.