Martha recommends The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) (Bookshop|Amazon) by Katie Mack, an assistant professor of physics at North Carolina State University. It’s a challenging read, but accessible enough to lay readers to provide a mind-stretching perspective on life, the universe, and everything. (Check out Mack’s moving poem and video “Disorientation.”) Grant passes along a recommendation from his teenage son Guthrie: Lois Lowry’s series The Giver (Bookshop|Amazon) about a boy coming of age in a strange, dystopian world. This is part of a complete episode.
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A Winter Dictionary (Bookshop|Amazon) by Paul Anthony Jones includes some words to lift your spirits. The verb whicken involves the lengthening of days in springtime, a variant of quicken, meaning “come to life.” Another word, breard, is...
Rosalind from Montgomery, Alabama, says her mother used to scold her for acting like a starnadle fool. The more common version of this term is starnated fool, a term that appears particular to Black English, and appears in the work of such writers...