Researchers who study the structure and evolution of the American family express unsullied astonishment at how rapidly the family has changed in recent years, the transformations often exceeding or capsizing those same experts’ predictions of just a few journal articles ago …. Also démodé is the old debate over whether mothers of dependent children should work outside the home …. [T]he issue is settled, and Paycheck Mommy is now a central organizing principle of the modern American family. The share of mothers employed full or part time has quadrupled since the 1950s and today accounts for nearly three-quarters of women with children at home.

By the late 1950s, American women were tired of being swathed in cumbersome layers. According to [Coco] Chanel, they were ready for the relaxed waist … of the modern silhouette even before the French. She rushed to fill the void that her American designer counterparts hadn’t, commenting, “They’ve been offering women [garments] which made it impossible to walk or run. American women refused these before Frenchwomen, because American women are more practical ….  They walk, they run.” What was already démodé in Paris was actually long overdue in the States.

“The idea that nature is not bound by the artificial boundaries that we assign to physics, chemistry, biology or mathematics has been around a long time,” said astrophysicist Mayank Vahia …. He said the Nobel prize in physiology and medicine shared by Jim Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, for instance, for unraveling the double helix structure of DNA, might not have been won but for the technical (read physical) tour de force of X-ray diffraction studies achieved by Rosalind Franklin and her colleagues.

A tour de force from 1938, by the German-born Argentine Annemarie Heinrich in league with her sister Ursula, finds the two reflected in a mirrored orb. In the background—from our point of view—Annemarie grins as she snaps the shutter of a standing camera; Ursula looms gigantically and wildly distorted as she leans forward to grasp the sphere. It takes time, enjoyably, to puzzle out the picture’s vertiginous structure.

While we say that the sun sets in the west, most times that’s not exactly the case …. [B]etween the first day of spring and the first day of autumn, the position on the horizon where the sun appears to set, known as the azimuth, actually occurs somewhat north of due west. The azimuth of the sunset slowly shifts northward until the day of the June solstice; thereafter, it reverses course and shifts back to the south. On June 21, the sun sets at an azimuth of 302 degrees, or 32 degrees north of due west. But for the setting sun to be seen from all of Manhattan’s cross streets, its azimuth must be 299 degrees, or 29 degrees north of due west.

[B]uilt by the ancestors of the Creek Indians in Georgia, western North Carolina and the eastern edge of Alabama, [t]hese five-sided mounds are unique to the region, and were “perfectly arranged on the apexes of a triangular matrix, stretching for several hundred miles,” according to an article by Richard Thornton, part of an alliance of Muskogean scholars. “One leg of the isosceles triangles was true north-south. Another leg was true east-west. The hypotenuse was the angle of the solar azimuth at sunset on the winter solstice. How the accurate surveying of such long distances was accomplished by the Indigenous people of the region has never been explained,[”] he wrote.