What Do You Call a Bunch of Black Holes: A Crush? A Scream?
There are pods of whales and gaggles of geese. Now astronomers are wondering which plural term would best suit the most enigmatic entity in the cosmos.
The galaxies NGC 5257 and NGC 5258, each anchored by supermassive black holes at their centers, located in the constellation Virgo, about 300 million light-years away.Credit.NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage-ESA/Hubble Collaboration, and A. Evans
What do you call a black hole? Anything you want, the old joke goes, as long as you don’t call it late for dinner. Black holes, after all, are nothing but hungry.
How Reading Is Like Love: Italo Calvino on the Ecstasy of Surrendering to Other Dimensions of Experience
“Lovers’ reading of each other’s bodies… differs from the reading of written pages in that it is not linear… What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space.”
By Maria Popova
“I function only by falling in love: with French and France; with the 15th Century; with microbiology, cosmology, sleep research,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her daybook, capturing the necessary passion that makes writing akin to falling in love. But reading is where the parallel begins. Some of us read in order to write one must first read about the fifteenth century and microbiology and sleep research before writing about it and some read purely for the private joy of a world enlarged. Reading is the real fulcrum that lifts us up into new realms of thought and feeling, new atmosphere
These are the big books this holiday season, to read or give
Patrick Rapa
Peak TV has peaked, movie theaters are no-go zones, the Eagles are painful to watch, and the squirrels outside your window are just lying around looking at their phones. We’re in the doldrums, and all signs point to a long, dull winter.
But at least we have books.
Books to give as gifts. Books to give ourselves. Good ones are coming out all the time, which is why we’ve assembled a list of some top new titles to help point you in the right direction. There, our job is done.