Under the influence

Video of one of my favorite people in the whole worldformer student, current friend, & stellar writer Lorelei Leereading my work & her own at Evan Karp’s Under The Influence series, in which writers & artists perform work by one of their major artistic influences then perform a piece of their own work that channels that influence.

(This was among the most moving experiences of my life. No joke.)

*

lorelei reads me poster

We remembered them, we forgot them

universe

The desire to trace one’s way back to the very beginning, to understand everything — whether the nature of “love” or the mechanics of the universe — is both deeply human & perhaps deeply flawed.  In this short audio story, hear a writer & two physicists grapple with versions of the same question: is it possible to understand everything, or do the answers to our questions always lead to more questions?  Jenny Hollowell kicks things off with her short story “A History of Everything, Including You,” then Brian Greene discusses the ways in which the latest developments in theoretical physics spell a crisis for science — where we find we’ve reached the limit of what we can see and test, and are left with mathematical equations that can’t be verified by experiment or observation.