“Documentary Films Are Exceptionally Good At Communicating New Knowledge About The World, And Since

“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” - Anais Nin

“For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.” - Carl Sagan  

Our Galaxy’s Magnetic Field Fingerprint https://www.sofia.usra.edu/multimedia/image-galleries/galactic-center

Bill Moyers Question: Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt is a tough book. It’s not Dispatches from Disneyworld. It paints some very stark portraits of poverty, despair, destructive behaviour. What makes you think people want to read that sort of thing these days?

Chris Hedges Answer: That’s not a question that Joe Sacco and I ever asked. It is absolutely imperative that we begin to understand what unfettered, unregulated capitalism does – the violence of that system.

Painting by Paco Pomet in Banksy’s Dismaland.

“The arts and sciences are avatars of human creativity.” - Mae Jemison 

Artwork by Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum. 

https://www.instagram.com/pamelaphatsimo/

“That brain of mine is something more than merely mortal as time will show.” - Ada Lovelace

Illustration by Moebius

“In times of destruction, create something.” - Maxine Hong Kingston

Painting by Paul Davey. http://www.mattahan.com/

"[The news] is like that friend you have — who always sees the worst in everything. You go out for coffee and feel empty afterward. Finally, you stop going. So what would be better? I make the case for routinely and systematically reporting out hope, agency and dignity in every story." — Amanda Ripley https://www.amandaripley.com/blog/i-have-a-secret-i-hid-it-for-years

“The ascension to the tenth level of intellectual heaven would be if we find the question to which the universe is the answer, and the nature of that question in and of itself explains why it was possible to describe it in so many different ways.” - Nima Arkani-Hamed

https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/a-different-kind-of-theory-of-everything

“You experience it to be within your power to stop reading this paragraph. Apparently, you freely decided to continue. Perhaps you are curious how it will unfold. But you strongly sense that you could have done otherwise; you could have stopped reading (and you still can). However, from what we know about the laws of nature, it is not clear how the brain could control a neural process that would result in different outcomes when starting from the same brain state. It is also unclear how your interest in the contents of this paragraph led to the neural process that culminated in you reading it.” - Uri Maoz

Illustration by Paolo Uberti.

https://www.chapman.edu/our-faculty/uri-maoz

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/09/free-will-bereitschaftspotential/597736/

"Rather than resorting to foxes and hedgehogs (a fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one big thing), I tend to think about modern scientists as either the drillers of ever-deeper holes (now the dominant route to fame) or scanners of wide horizons (now a much diminished group). I have always preferred to scan as far and as wide as my limited capabilities have allowed me to do so." ― Vaclav Smil, author of How the World Really Works.

Artwork by Jennifer Davis.