A 17th-century wooden sculpture of Vishnu beginning the world. Symbolic features include the snake that Vishnu sleeps upon, the multi-headed Ananta, who has existed throughout the cycles of birth and destruction that permeate the universe. Also featured are seven sages so enlightened that they have transcended the episodic cycles of birth and decay, and nine of the avatars or incarnations of Vishnu, each upon a lotus.
The COVID outbreaks in American meat-packing warehouses have recently cast attention to the frankly horrifying working conditions in these plants. Like coal-mining and cesspool-cleaning, the…
When I think of Matthew Hopkins, self-styled “Witchfinder General,” I think about episodes in human history where we really went wrong. This image is from…
You are looking at the cover of one of the very first science-fiction novels. Written by the astronomer Johannes Kepler in 1608 (but published posthumously),…