Word: agee
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...bothered by the fact that I will never have beautiful handwriting. My printing will always be fat and round and look as if it came from a 12-year-old. And let's be honest: the Declaration of Independence is already hard to read. We are living in the age of social networks and frenzied conversation, composing more e-mails, texting more messages and keeping in touch with more people than ever before. Maybe this is the trade-off. We've given up beauty for speed, artistry for efficiency. And yes, maybe we are a little bit lazy...
...biweekly open-mike events in Philadelphia and Los Angeles offer feedback over booze and pizza, while simulcast viewers weigh in via Twitter. The wide reach makes some participants nervous. "You have no control over who's listening," says Michael Riordan, 26, who unveiled his plan for a New Age yearbook company at the inaugural Philly event in January. "I didn't give a lot of details...
This anecdote appears in The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes (Pantheon; 576 pages), which is the most flat-out fascinating book so far this year. You wouldn't get that from its title, which sounds like a tender coming-of-age novel, nor from its subtitle - How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science - which sounds like a course you napped through in college. But Holmes' account of experimental science at the end of the 1700s - when amateurs could still make major discoveries, when one new data point could overthrow a worldview - is beyond riveting. Science...
Herschel is the most touching figure in Age of Wonder. A refugee from Germany, he began his career as an oboist, but at 27 became consumed with curiosity about the stars and started building his own telescopes. He was discovered by the son of a Royal Society member, who stumbled over him moon-gazing in the streets one night through a home-brewed 7-ft. (2 m) telescope that turned out to be more powerful than that of the astronomer royal. Herschel went on to pioneer the idea of a vast and unimaginably old universe. After looking through Herschel...
Holmes doesn't romanticize the Romantics. The first great age of ballooning, which began so amusingly in the skies above Paris, rapidly declined into mere showmanship. (The flamboyant Italian aerialist Vincent Lunardi once proposed the following toast: "I give you me, Lunardi - whom all the ladies love!") From there it descended into tragedy and defeat. At one of Lunardi's public launches, a young man got tangled up in some of the balloon's ropes, was dragged aloft, then fell to his death. Lunardi died in poverty, and the dauntless Pilātre was killed while attempting to cross the English...