What made you want to write a book on beauty?

This world is a beautiful place. Sometimes that is easy to forget. I have always wanted to be able to explain this beauty as something objective, a fact, a quality about the way the world evolved, not just some subjective human opinion. It turned out that realization of beauty was one of the motivating factors behind Darwin’s discovery of evolution, a fact that science seems to have forgotten. I wanted to bring this history back into today’s discussion about what life is and how it got here.

You’re a musician, what are you doing writing about visual art?

Right, I have no idea what I’m talking about. But everyone around me is a visual artist—my mother is a painter, my father was an architect, my wife is an artist, I grew up with discussions of modernism and postmodernism and surrealism and impressionism all around the house. Over the years I became fascinated with the idea that paying attention to abstract twentieth century art has led us to see nature in a new way, and I was surprised no one had written about this. I really wanted to see in what ways art has specifically influenced science, and how it might have more influence in the future.

Henning Koch contemplates what happens once you walk out of your door and take a look at what is really happening in the world.

Elizabeth Eslami finds herself in the wrong place with the right bison.

Taking the plunge while you still can.

Ross Hickerson writes a poem about the transition from mockery of civilization to reality of feral wilderness under our feet, and about the messy results for those affected. “…The stain on the sidewalk, it looks like my face, John….”

Before a fire, during an unusually cold winter, Ronlyn Domingue remembers the trees that fueled the flames. She taps into memories of a swamp chestnut, water oak, sycamore, and beech—and what gifts they shared beyond shade. This will be one of several essays in which she gets in touch with her Inner Druid.

On the road toward a natural spectacle he’d been warned to not come all this way to skip, Nathaniel Missildine has the urge to drive slower and look elsewhere. Because not everything explodes on schedule.

Do you…did you…fear the world was going to end in a great bloom of mushroom clouds? You aren’t and weren’t alone. Ronlyn Domingue walks straight into the darkness with Donald Fagen, Ronald Reagan, and J. Robert Oppenheimer and searches for peace on the other side.

These arrangements of empty chairs are what’s left of celebration, argument, meditation, sleep and revelation.  They huddle together like still animals in the cold.  From a chair beneath a plane tree, the round tracks of a cane disappear into the gravel. The single chairs are absent of their poets, readers and afternoon philosophers. Those side [...]