Speaking of places that were once deemed scorched and desolate but now exhibit signs of life: Mars!
Regular readers of this newsletter know I’ll take any opportunity to talk about astronomical phenomena, and I have several reasons to do so this week. Just a few hours ago, NASA’s Mars 2020 Mission launched the Perseverance Rover into space. Named by a teenager who won a NASA essay contest (and has a keen knack for timely branding), Perseverance will travel for about seven months before landing in the red planet’s Jezero Crater, where it will start sniffing around for signs of past life.
Back on Earth, local authors are sharing the results of more personal explorations with two new nonfiction books. Emily Levesque, a professor in the University of Washington’s astronomy department and expert on massive stars (!), is publishing her first popular science book: The Last Stargazers: An Enduring Story of Astronomy’s Vanishing Explorers (out Aug. 4). In it, she introduces us to the modern-day scientists keeping their eyes on the skies, and shares her own stories, “from the lonely quiet of midnight stargazing to tall tales of wild bears loose in the observatory.” The book is already getting great press, but of course she had me at “a love letter to astronomy.” Levesque will speak about the book virtually via Elliott Bay Book Company (Aug. 3, 5 p.m., free).
Seattle food writer Molly Wizenberg (Orangette blog, A Homemade Life) is making a galactic shift with her new memoir, The Fixed Stars (out Aug. 4). The book (also racking up glowing reviews) traces her sudden awakening — after a life of thinking she was straight and a decade of being married to a man — to her own queer identity. In her customary frank and friendly prose, she reveals her personal reckoning with love, marriage, parenting, divorce and sexual orientation. The title comes from the ancient astronomical concept that stars stick together in the same constellations — but of course those are just familiar patterns we’ve named, seen only from one perspective. Wizenberg will have a virtual book launch at Elliott Bay Books (Aug. 4, 6 p.m., free).
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July 31, 2020 at 04:40AM
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Editor's Notebook: Renaming parks along the Duwamish River - Crosscut
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