Maybe our world will grow kinder eventually.
Maybe the desire to make something beautiful
is the piece of God that is inside each of us.
The Blue Horses of Our Destiny – artist Franz Marc, the wisdom of animals, and the fight of beauty against brutality, with a side of Mary Oliver.
Luscious 19th-century French botanical illustrations of some of the most vibrant and unusual plants of the Americas and the Caribbean, including the surprising natural state of familiar foods like cashews, cacao, and yams.
“Take Me to Your Leader” – playful, poignant video (featuring the photographic archive of Chloe Pang) for the first single from Joan As Police Woman’s haunting forthcoming record The Solution is Restless (featuring what might be the last live jam magic by the late Afrobeat co-creator Tony Allen, considered by many the greatest drummer of all time).
Anna Atkins died 150 years ago today as the first woman to take a photograph and the first person to publish a book illustrated with photographic images. Here are her surreally beautiful cyanotypes of algae.
Of Trees, Tenderness, and the Moon – the stunning vintage woodblock prints of Japanese artist Hasui Kawase.
The story of the world’s first planetarium design and the forgotten 18th-century visionary whose futuristic homage to Newton dared generations to reimagine the poetry of public spaces, the architecture of shadow, and the relationship between nature and human creativity.
Step into Dorothy Lathrop’s dreamscapes – haunting 100-year-old illustrations of fairy-poems by the woman who became the first to win the Caldecott Medal, the Nobel Prize of illustration.
Stunning celestial art from the 1750 book that first described the spiral shape of the Milky Way and dared imagine the existence of galaxies beyond our own.
The Snail with the Right Heart — a love story, a science story, a story about the poetry of existence, about time and chance, genetics and gender, life and death, evolution and infinity, about not mistaking difference for defect, about recognizing diversity as nature’s wellspring of resilience and beauty.
“Where is my cyanometer,” Thoreau exclaimed in his journal on a blue-skied spring day, referring to the curious device invented by the Swiss scientist Horace-Bénédict de Saussure a century earlier to measure the blueness of the sky.
Here are some of the most beautiful meditations on blue from 200 years of literature, including Thoreau, Goethe, Toni Morrison, Rachel Carson, Virginia Woolf, Rebecca Solnit, Georgia O'Keeffe, and other titans of the world in words.
The Lost Spells – from author Robert Macfarlane and artist Jackie Morris, a rewilding of the human heart in a lyrical illustrated invocation of nature.
Trailer for His Own Life – Ric Burns’s fantastic documentary about the visionary neurologist and poetic soul Oliver Sacks, he of uncommon insight into everything from the psychological pillars of creativity to the physiological healing power of nature, and above all about love, lunacy, and a life fully lived.