The lights dim and soon the theatre becomes dark. The audience conversations end with a few softly dissipating whispers, and the movie begins. Nina Sayers, a young ballerina, dances the prologue to Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, a ballet expressing a story drawn from Russian folk tales about a princess who has been turned into a White Swan and can only be turned back if a man swears eternal fidelity to her. However, this is not that ballet. This is the beginning of Black Swan, a controversial movie employing symbolism in a complex interweaving of dance and film to reveal the struggles and paradoxes...

Richard Dadd is a trickster, a pre-post-modern enigma wrapped in a Shakespearean Midsummer Night's Dream; an Elizabethan Puck living in a smothering Victorian insane asylum, foreshadowing and, in brilliant, Mad Hatter conundrums, entering the fragmented shards of today's nightmarish oxymorons long before the artists currently trying to give them the joker's ephemeral maps of discourse. The author thinks of Bob Dylan's Ballad of a Thin Man, that cryptic refusal to reduce the warped mirrors of reality to prosaic lies, or, perhaps All Along the Watchtower or Mr Tambourine Man. Even more than...

On Monday, 8:15 a.m., August 6, 1945, the world changed forever.In the single largest act of destruction ever initiated by humans, a bomb with the equivalent force of 20,000 tons of TNT shattered Hiroshima, killing tens of thousands of civilians, people who had become used to the American war planes flying overhead, planes that were purposely not dropping bombs on their city, to the point where the rush to the bomb shelters had become somewhat lackadaisical, and the normal activities continued with little interruption--getting the children up and off to school, opening the many small retail...

In his book about the discovery of the structure of DNA, James Watson wrote, "So we had lunch, telling ourselves that a structure this beautiful just had to exist." Indeed, the quest most often asked by scientists about a scientific theory is "Is it beautiful?" Yes, beauty equals truth. Scientists know, mathematicians know. But the beauties, the truths of mathematics and science were not the truths that inspired the author as a child, and he intuitively knew that the truths he needed come from a different way of knowing, a way of knowing not of the world of logic and reason and explanation...