Patrick Ryan discusses his new collection The Dream Life of Astronauts, the “bad old days,” and the human need to believe that everything will turn out okay in the end (even when we know it won’t).
Why Finnish women matter to the history of science fiction. Holiday science books: let visions of squid and sarcophagi dance in their heads. Astronauts survive thanks to a black female mathematician.…
Every time I leap there is a chance I will fall, and every time I fall there is a chance I will finally crack my head open like a Faberge egg and luminous black spiders will crawl out to mark the outline of my body with blinking stars and black thread.
Turning onto my street and looking south I feel the ground drop beneath me every time—I turn the corner and the sidewalk falls. I feel invisible then, as if I’ve vaporized.
Extremely large and incredibly close (to your tent): bison! Did you know Tom Sawyer used glowing fungi (a real thing) to light up a tunnel? Watch 6,000 years of civilization…
A professor who lived as a badger shares nature-writing tips. Casual sex after college: definitely a thing. Peanut butter purity battles—and is “natural” food really better? NASA plays God, recreates Earth.…
My sister used to accuse me of intellectualizing mental illness when I spoke of our brother’s brain, his schizophrenia, in scientific terms... I never knew how to explain what I felt—that science could be a way of loving something more deeply.