I have always been an amateur cosmologist at heart; the mathematical rigors of real physics have always bored and vexed me, but the conceptual ideas surrounding our universe are, well, more interesting than anything we could ever possibly invent ourselves. The trouble with storytelling is, I suppose, that all stories are like many other stories, and even the most extraordinary ones are so familiar that, by all rights, we shouldn't ever be in awe of them. Still, what seems the most pedestrian, the most quotidien, the most mundane has, somewhere in it, the threads of the fantastic. No matter how dull a life and its story seem, it is, after all, the result of the wildest and most unlikely circumstances: that this person—of all possible people—was ever born, that the Earth existed to allow that birth, that the universe ever burst into existence to accommodate this one, very small, planet. READ MORE

Jack White is to be applauded for the way the he's handling his "I-can-do-whatever-the-fuck-I-want" status atop the contemporary rocker scene. The three bands, the conservationist record label, James Bond themes, high-art ultraviolent videos. And now, best of all, he's releasing as a 7-inch single the audio track of "A Glorious Dawn"-the odd, and oddly affecting, Youtube hit from composer John Boswell that mixes autotuned clips from Carl Sagan's 1980 PBS special Cosmos (plus special guest MC Stephen Hawking) over chillout-room trance beats. Pitchfork's report on the matter also informs us that White recently refused to sing vocals on a collaboration with former Guns n' Roses guitarist Slash. Which seems slightly less important than Carl Sagan's uncanny resemblance to Michael Dukakis.