Archives – Real Astrology

In an old Star Trek episode, a 24th-century starship captain is weighed down by a knotty problem about how to deal with two of her enemies who are at war with each other. Unable to come up with a viable solution, she retreats to the holodeck, where virtual reality technology can create a convincingly real […]

Why should you work harder than everyone else? Why is it up to you to pick up the slack when others are suffering from outbreaks of laziness and incompetence? And why should you be the fearless leader who is focused on fixing the glitches and smoothing over the rough patches when no one else seems […]

What is the source of our first suffering? wrote philosopher Gaston Bachelard. “It lies in the fact that we hesitated to speak. It was born in the moment when we accumulated silent things within us.” Luckily for you, Taurus, the cosmic rhythms are aligned in such a way as to free you from at least […]

In the movies I’ve seen that depict battle scenes from hundreds of years ago, every army has numerous soldiers whose job it is to carry festive flags and pennants. If this is an accurate depiction of history, what does it mean? That powerful symbols were crucial to inspiring the troops’ heroic efforts? That touches of […]

Using a radio telescope, astronomers at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy have been scanning the center of the galaxy. They’re looking for evidence of amino acids that could be the building blocks of life. So far their hunt has been inconclusive. In my opinion, though, they’ve stumbled upon an even more appealing discovery: […]

Each one of us is a blend of life and death. In the most literal sense, our bodies always contain old cells that are dying and new cells that are emerging as replacements. From a more metaphorical perspective, our familiar ways of seeing and thinking and feeling are constantly atrophying, even as fresh modes emerge. […]

Allure magazine sought out Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez, the women who wrote the book Perfumes: The A to Z Guide. “What are the sexiest-smelling perfumes of all time?” they asked. Turin and Sanchez said Chinatown was at the top of their list. Their explanation: “If wearing Opium is like walking around with a bullhorn […]

Last June, comedian Stephen Colbert reported that President Obama’s big TV address to Americans about the Gulf catastrophe was a failure because it went over the heads of too many people. Language experts who analyzed Obama’s speech determined that it was written at a tenth-grade level ” too professorial, scolded Colbert. I wonder what he […]

In the 18th century, the French Academy laid down rules about the differences between professional and amateur paintings. For example, it was decreed that true artists must create a “licked surface,” hiding all evidence of their brushstrokes. The illusion was more convincing that way; viewers could sink their attention fully into the image without being […]

If your home is like a museum, a staid assemblage of fine memories, I suggest you shake things up a bit. If your imagination is filled with tape loops that keep running storylines you’ve heard a thousand times before, shake things up a bit. If your daily actions are so thoroughly possessed by the anesthetizing […]