Saving Daylight—From What?
Now I remember to reset our vintage clocks, and we grin about it—but I still struggle with the mnemonic. “Fall forward” sounds just as likely to me as “Fall back.”
Now I remember to reset our vintage clocks, and we grin about it—but I still struggle with the mnemonic. “Fall forward” sounds just as likely to me as “Fall back.”
If we were truly okay with every possible permutation of gender, sexuality, and anatomy, language might cease to be a minefield. Someone who was male or nonbinary but had the anatomy for childbearing could give birth and lactate and call it either breast or chestfeeding, as they liked.
It is easy to say goodbye to five of the six Seuss books on the estate’s pull list; they are not beloved.
Though I rarely drive farther than a few miles from home, I am paying inordinate attention to the weather forecast. Maybe this is because I have been cut off for a year from other places I used to feel part of, or because I spend so much more time outside now.But I could also be succumbing to family tradition.
The first model kits were the simple Frog Penguin 1:72 scale airplanes made in 1936. But the first model-maker of note was Leonardo da Vinci, who shrank his ideas to scale and constructed them with exquisite care. No fussy materials or after-market add-ons.
"The Dissident" brought audiences at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival to their feet, and many left in tears. Then the doc sat, untouched, for six months. Finally, a small company called Briarcliff Entertainment acquired it and made it available for rental online. It will be shown at movie theaters beginning March 11—in New Zealand.
My child-brain pictures a monster waiting to consume me, but black holes are not monsters. They are not even things. A black hole, explains astrophysicist Janna Levin, is nothing: “pure empty spacetime—no atoms, light, strings, or particles of any kind, dark or bright. It’s empty space—or, in physics slang, the vacuum.”
The German language invented the most complicated, somber, interesting words for life in a pandemic. And French added the most nuance. And Spanish emphasized sociability. As for us? Quite a few of our neologisms sound like a spoiled kid pouting.
Readers snapped up John Lutz’s police procedurals because they could tell he knew the details of police work. As a switchboard operator for St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, he had listened to beat cops phoning in from call boxes. “That gave me insight into how they think,” he told me. “Police think they are aware of a depth of the dark side of human nature that other people can’t begin to imagine.”
Criticize their politics all you like, the French know how to savor life. Foibles that create delicious little whirls of scandal and drama here, they dismiss with an amused shrug. They save their energy for protecting their culture, their language—and now, their roosters.