Somebody Left the Dome Open

The Minnesota Astronomical Society runs public star parties at Eagle Lake Observatory out by Norwood Young America — every other Saturday from spring through fall, telescopes wheeled out and pointed at whatever's up. It's free, it's all-weather, and July dusk lingers so late you'll be waiting a while for the first star. Which is sort of the point.

Eagle Lake Observatory →

The Metaphors We Keep

In her new book The Edge of Space-Time, physicist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein opens on a strange claim: you can't really do science without poetry. The figures we reach for — the universe as a balloon, a species called 'invasive' — don't just describe the world, they quietly decide what we're able to notice about it. Borrowing her term for the table: which of your own abiding metaphors is doing more shaping than you'd like?

The Boredom We Traded Away

Somewhere in the last decade the empty moment disappeared — the line, the wait, the walk — all of it backfilled with a screen. But boredom was never nothing; it was the quiet before an idea, the stretch where a mind wanders somewhere useful. Worth sitting with: when did you last let yourself be plainly, uselessly bored?