1874: Carl Bosch, a chemist whose work would transform agriculture and industry — and eventually enable the Green Revolution — is born. Bosch’s contribution to humanity was the development of the Haber-Bosch process, a technique for creating ammonia in large quantities. Ammonia is an essential component of agricultural fertilizers, because it’s rich in nitrogen — [...]

E-books have hit the mainstream, and for the first time are consistently outselling their pulp-and-ink brethren, according to Amazon.com. Amazon hit a symbolic milestone last holiday season, when for one day its sales of e-books exceeded the number of dead-tree books it had sold. Now the company has hit a more significant milestone, selling 143 e-books [...]

SAN FRANCISCO — Opera and Twitter: Could any two vehicles for human expression be more diametrically opposed? And yet they kind of go together, as I found out this week while live-tweeting the San Francisco Opera’s performance of Wagner’s Die Walküre, a four-and-half-hour epic noted for its ambitious staging, bravura solos, massively overwhelming orchestration and [...]

Ah, summer: The time when runners don their skimpiest spandex and hit the trails in search of sunshine, fresh air and dehydration and, uh heat exhaustion. Seriously, staying hydrated is important. It’s even more critical if your run stretches to an hour or more and the weather is hot. Unless you’re on a well-stocked marathon [...]

The haiku and micropoetry journal I edit, tinywords, got 875 submissions in the course of 2 weeks for our upcoming summer issue. Since I expect I’ll be able to publish about 50 or 60 poems in this issue, that means the acceptance rate is going to be significantly less than 10%. It also means I [...]

This is my living faith, an active faith, a faith of verbs: to question, explore, experiment, experience, walk, run, dance, play, eat, love, learn, dare, taste, touch, smell, listen, argue, speak, write, read, draw, provoke, emote, scream, sin, repent, cry, kneel, pray, bow, rise, stand, look, laugh, cajole, create, confront, confound, walk back, walk forward, [...]

I’m amazed and honored to see a poem I wrote included in this collection of Canadian tanka. There is even a translation into French (not by me) — a first for me. one petal from the princess tree clings to the windshield— I drive away looking in the mirror un pétale de l’arbre impérial s’accroche [...]

From 1925: The pens and tongues of contumely were arrested. Mocking mouths were shut. Even righteous protestation hushed its clamor, as when, having striven manfully in single combat, a high-helmed champion is stricken by Jove’s bolt and the two snarling armies stand at sudden gaze, astonished and bereft a moment of their rancor. That was [...]

Does it blend? Yes, but first you need to smash the screen and bend the thing in half so it will fit into the blender.