Toni Morrison Tag

New revelations coming out of the January 6 Congressional committee hearings this past week raised the hair straight up off my head in ways even I had not anticipated.

Expectable clichés are mouthed in this country every time another atrocity is committed. Thoughts and prayers. Sympathies and condolences. Processing, trauma, healing, closure.

For the first time, a spacecraft has sent back pictures of the sky from so far away that some stars appear to be in different positions than we would see them from Earth. More than 4 billion miles from home and speeding toward interstellar space, NASA's New Horizons has traveled so far that it now has a unique view of the nearest stars, but it looks like an alien sky. The difference is due to parallax, the same effect you see if you hold up a finger and close one eye, then the other. It’s a shift in perspective, caused by New Horizons’ great distance from Earth. I love the concept of parallax. My latest novel is named for it. A shift in perspective changes . . . everything. But once you've dared experience it you might mourn the time you lost believing your previous perspective was the only one....

Ready for another go at language? I'll resist the temptation to rave at length about how Trumpisms have leached into the speech of even serious people, polluting journalists and constitutional lawyers who now find themselves dropping "This I can tell you,” “When you look at . . . ,” and way too many gushes of incredibles and biggests and mosts for comfort.