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.

Elizabeth Blackwell is 29. The year is 1736. Her husband is in debtor’s prison and she has a small child to feed at home. What does she do? She turns desperation into inspiration, learning botany and painting an exquisite encyclopedia of medicinal plants: A Curious Herbal. 

Behold the oldest known telescope in America, circa 1640, held at Chicago’s Adler Planetarium. For temporal perspective, it was made in the final years of Galileo’s life, just after he unsettled the universe with his landmark treatise Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. Attributed to an unknown Italian telescope crafter and made of leather, pasteboard, and glass, it is one of only twenty surviving telescopes made prior to 1650. 

Complement with the story of the landmark detection of gravitational waves — the greatest breakthrough in astronomy since Galileo first pointed his crude telescope (not unlike this one) at the heavens, then revisit the world’s oldest pencil and oldest computer.

(HT Chicago Design Museum)

Hannah Arendt, writing in the wake of the Holocaust and spectacularly timely today, on the normalization of evil and our only effective antidote to it. 

A century and a half before the Women’s March, the pioneering astronomer Maria Mitchell paved the way for American women in science and education. 

Walt Whitman would’ve proudly marched in the Women’s March. 150 years ago, he wrote beautifully about why a democratic society is a feminist society. 

Construction of the Brooklyn Bridge began on this day in 1870 and was completed thanks to one remarkable woman: Emily Roebling.

The Glass Universe – the untold story of how Harvard’s 19th-century female astronomers revolutionized our understanding of the cosmos decades before women could vote. 

How pioneering physicist Lise Meitner, born on this day in 1878, was denied the Nobel Prize for the groundbreaking discovery she herself made but paved the way for women in science nonetheless.

The great French poet, essayist, and critic Charles Baudelaire died on this day in 1867 and left us his abiding wisdom on beauty and strangeness. 

For Goethe’s birthday, his theory of color and emotion