Neil deGrasse Tyson Lists 8 (Free) Books Every Intelligent Person Should Read

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Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

A num­ber of years ago, a Red­dit user posed the ques­tion to Neil deGrasse Tyson: “Which books should be read by every sin­gle intel­li­gent per­son on the plan­et?”

Below, you will find the book list offered up by the astro­physi­cist, direc­tor of the Hay­den Plan­e­tar­i­um, and pop­u­lar­iz­er…

Discover the Only Painting Van Gogh Ever Sold During His Lifetime

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It may have crossed your mind, while behold­ing paint­ings of Vin­cent van Gogh, that you’d like to own one your­self some­day. If so, you’ll have to get in line with more than a few bil­lion­aires, and even they may nev­er see one go up on the auc­tion block. This would prob­a­bly come as…

How 16th-Century Artist Joris Hoefnagel Made Insects Beautiful—and Changed Science Forever

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In Eng­lish, most of the words we’d use to refer to insects sound off-putting at best and fear­some at worst, at least to those with­out an ento­mo­log­i­cal bent. Dutch, close a lin­guis­tic rela­tion though it may be, offers a more endear­ing alter­na­tive in beestjes, which refers to all these “lit­tle beasts” in which the artists…

Iconic Animator Chuck Jones Creates an Oscar-Winning Animation About the Virtues of Universal Health Care (1949)

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While our coun­try looks like it might be com­ing apart at the seams, it’s good to revis­it, every once in a while, moments when it did work. And that’s not so that we can feel nos­tal­gic about a lost time, but so that we can remind our­selves how, giv­en the right con­di­tions, things could work…

A Visualization of the History of Technology: 1,889 Innovations Across Three Million Years

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“Any suf­fi­cient­ly advanced tech­nol­o­gy is indis­tin­guish­able from mag­ic.” So holds the third and most famous of the “three laws” orig­i­nal­ly artic­u­lat­ed by sci­ence fic­tion writer Arthur C. Clarke. Even when it was first pub­lished in the late nine­teen-six­ties, Clarke’s third law would have felt true to any res­i­dent of the devel­oped world,…