The question at the heart of Epiphanies is: What does it mean to be human when the definition of human is in flux? For example, in Pavane for a Dead Rover, Housley explores whether it is possible to grieve for a robot. In Psalm for a New Human Species, she asks what such a discovery would mean to a persons sense of self-worth. She, then, turns to Leonardo da Vinci who lived a life of epiphany. If things were right side up, he turned them upside down, intentionally disorienting himself to gain understanding. Whether she is writing about a scientific discovery or the painting of the Mona Lisa,...

Harry Rosenberg grew up near the hottest place on Earth-Death Valley-in a very unusual dwelling: a red caboose. His father repaired bridges for the Tonopah & Tidewater Railroad, which hauled ore from remote mines. During the Depression, the Rosenbergs traveled from washout to washout across a fiery land prone, paradoxically, to devastating floods of the Amargosa and Mojave Rivers. No other place on Earth was better suited to forge a curious boy into a metallurgist who would spend his life unlocking the vast potential of a difficult, new metal-titanium.

In Fire and Forge, author...

Harry Rosenberg grew up near the hottest place on Earth-Death Valley-in a very unusual dwelling: a red caboose. His father repaired bridges for the Tonopah & Tidewater Railroad, which hauled ore from remote mines. During the Depression, the Rosenbergs traveled from washout to washout across a fiery land prone, paradoxically, to devastating floods of the Amargosa and Mojave Rivers. No other place on Earth was better suited to forge a curious boy into a metallurgist who would spend his life unlocking the vast potential of a difficult, new metal-titanium.

In Fire and Forge, author...

SIBLINGS: Our First Macrocosm Our families, especially our siblings, provide our first macrocosm. How much of that experience do we carry out into the world as part of our deepest, inchoate expectations of the world or of ourselves? Is birth order destiny? How are we shaped by the constellation we're born into, whether dyad or nebula? What is the appropriate sentiment to have towards those with whom we may share only a preponderance of genes and, before we have any choices in the matter, propinquity? Towards those who knew us before we had a sense of self? Towards those who helped us define...

In twentieth-century Germany, Karl-Friedrich Bonhoeffer rose to prominence as a brilliant physical chemist, even as several of his relatives-Dietrich Bonhoeffer among them-became involved in the resistance to Hitler, leading to their executions.