ACCENT: GARDEN OF MARVELS by Ruth Kassinger

  This is a delightful compendium of botanical discoveries — and how they’ve shaped human history.  Kassinger opens with a brief overview of how the sciences had tackled more out-of-reach topics, like constellations and orbits.  Ancient Greek attempted to understand atomic structure.  But plants had been left out of much of the study. She writes:…

REVIEW: THE HAPPENING (2008)

Try to forget what you already know about M. Night Shyamalan.  Forget his tropes, his types and patterns.  Look at this film on the face of it.  Like any horror movie, “the terror” is a simple, basic thing, with consequences that affect humanity.  But the presentation of the ‘facts’ is muddled, and the intelligence of…