As chance would have it, I’m teaching Mary Oliver in a few weeks as part of my class on writing about the environment. If you haven’t read her essays before, I highly recommend Upstream. RIP.
“Sometimes the desire to be lost again, as long ago, comes over me like a vapor. With growth into adulthood, responsibilities claimed me, so many heavy coats. I didn’t choose them, I don’t fault them, but it took time to reject them. Now in the spring I kneel, I put my face into the packets of violets, the dampness, the freshness, the sense of ever-ness. Something is wrong, I know it, if I don’t keep my attention on eternity. May I be the tiniest nail in the house of the universe, tiny but useful. May I stay forever in the stream. May I look down upon the windflower and the bull thistle and the coreopsis with the greatest respect.”
Razor company Gillette has a question for men in the age of Me Too: “Is this the best a man can get?”
Gillette’s advertising clip, which has gone viral since it debuted on Monday, turns the company’s 30-year-old ad tagline into a challenge for males to do better and be better as the nation reckons with the treatment of women at home, at work and on the street.
Gillette said in a statement that the point of the nearly two-minute ad titled “We Believe” is to address “actions commonly associated with ‘toxic masculinity,’” which also includes bullying and eliminating the “boys will be boys” excuse for unacceptable behavior.
“Gillette believes in the best in men,” said Gary Coombe, president of Procter & Gamble Co.‘s global grooming division, which owns the razor company. “By holding each other accountable, eliminating excuses for bad behavior, and supporting a new generation working toward their personal ‘best,’ we can help create positive change that will matter for years to come.”
When you hit your 40s, it’s only natural to want to try new things.
That little platitude holds true not only for those suffering midlife crises, but also, apparently, for at least one spacecraft launched by NASA. Just a few months after celebrating its 41st birthday, the Voyager 2 probe has left its familiar environs and entered interstellar space — only the second human-made object in history to do so, after Voyager 1 did it in 2012.
“I think we’re all happy and relieved that the Voyager probes have both operated long enough to make it past this milestone,” Suzanne Dodd, the Voyager project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a statement released Monday. “This is what we’ve all been waiting for.”
The moment they were waiting for arrived early last month, when Voyager 2 left what’s known as the heliosphere — the vast bubble of plasma and particles generated by the sun and stirred in solar winds. This bubble ends at a boundary called the heliopause, where the sun’s magnetic field peters out and solar winds give way to interstellar space.
“Inside the bubble, most of the material has come from our sun and the magnetic field has come from our sun,” Voyager project scientist Ed Stone explained in a video provided by NASA. “Outside the bubble, most of the material comes from other stars that exploded 5, 10, 15 million years ago.”
Voyager 2 Bids Adieu To The Heliosphere, Entering Interstellar Space