Jonathan

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Ian Leslie
“For all his formidable self-confidence, he harboured doubts about the person he was at heart, and sometimes questioned whether he had a heart at all. Iris Caldwell, his girlfriend from Liverpool, recalled that her mother had accused him of being emotionally cold. It ate at him: years later, just before the release of 'Yesterday', Paul called Iris and said her mother should listen to Yesterday to see if it changed her mind. In an interview in the 1980s, he brought up the moment when he heard about his mother's death (‘What are we going to do for money?’), and said, ‘I’ve never forgiven myself for that. Really, deep down, I never have quite forgiven myself for that.’ As he danced through a Beatle life in which every door seemed to open the moment he touched it, he retained, in his mind, the baleful image of himself he drew as a teenager: a face that scowled rather than smiled. He once described his public self as 'pleasantly insincere’. He was drawn to those who saw through his masks and loved him nonetheless. Being accepted by John confirmed to him that he was special. Being loved by Linda, and by Heather, convinced him he was good.”
Ian Leslie, John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs

Ed Yong
“Giant (and colossal) squid are unique in being massive animals that need to see massive predators, and their singular need has led to a singular Umwelt. With the largest and most sensitive eyes that exist, they scan one of the darkest environments on Earth for the faint sparkling outlines of charging whales.”
Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

Ed Yong
“Over a third of humanity, and almost 80 percent of North Americans, can no longer see the Milky Way. "The thought of light traveling billions of years from distant galaxies only to be washed out in the last billionth of a second by the glow from the nearest strip mall depresses me no end," vision scientist Sonke Johnsen once wrote.

[…] Sensory pollution is the pollution of disconnection. It detaches us from the cosmos. It drowns out the stimuli that link animals to their surroundings and to each other. In making the planet brighter and louder, we have also fragmented it. While razing rainforests and bleaching coral reefs, we have also endangered sensory environments. That must now change. We have to save the quiet, and preserve the dark.”
Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

Vilhelm Moberg
“The ones she had borne into the world, and the ones they in turn would bear, would from the beginning of their lives say what her own tongue was unable to say: At home here in America-back there in Sweden. With this thought, listening to her children's breathing, Kristina went to sleep.”
Vilhelm Moberg, The Emigrants

Katherine Rundell
“All of these creatures are iridescent for a reason. But the golden mole is blind. Its eyes are covered with a layer of skin and fur, and it has never seen its own radiance. It lives almost entirely underground, in the cooler depths of earth and sand half a metre below the surface, emerging only to hunt for insects. It's currently thought that the fur evolved to be densely flattened, hard-wearing and low-friction to make burrowing easier. The iridescence is an accidental by-product. It is glory without necessary purpose, cast up by the world's slow finessing. So they burrow and breed and hunt, live and die under the African sun, unaware of their beauty, unknowingly glowing.”
katherine rundell

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