George Harrison died 13 years ago this month. For nearly a decade before his death, he had been working slowly on a new solo album while dealing with a cancer diagnosis, surgery and treatments, a remission, and then, a new cancer and its eventual metastasization. He was also stabbed 40 times in a house invasion about two years before his death.

So George Harrison’s late 1990s was a period in which the “material world,” as he once called life, appeared to be a genuinely unpleasant place, one that no longer wanted him around, but he retained a sharp wit about it anyway. Asked about his attacker, Harrison said that he “clearly wasn’t auditioning for the Traveling Wilburys.” (The attacker suffered from untreated schizophrenia and was found not guilty of attempted murder by reason of insanity.)

Working on his music through all of this, Harrison finished enough tracks to have a…

Most copies of “Tristram Shandy” by Laurence Sterne are about 600 pages long. The book is a fictional autobiography in which Tristram, the not-quite hero of a story that is not quite his own, attempts to tell us about his life from birth onward. However, he does not even begin to begin telling us about his birth and his first day on earth until the fourth volume because, like his own conception on page 1, his story is much interrupted.

(On page one, at the very moment Tristram is to be conceived, his mother asks his father if he remembered to wind the clock, an ill-timed interruption that, according to Tristram, produced an author who is incapable of telling a story straight to its end without breaks, questions, and digressions.)

The full title of Sterne’s masterpiece is “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman,” and it was…

Every 33 years, Comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle makes its closest approach to the sun; it is one of a handful of comets that can be seen more than once in a person’s life. Tempel-Tuttle’s most recent visit to the inner solar system was in March 1998.

As each comet approaches the sun, the energy from our star burns off material from the comet, creating the famous bright appearance and cosmically long tail that we see with every comet (these phenomena are on display this week with the approach of Comet ISON). This material, mostly particles the size of grains of sand, is left behind in space. Every time Comet Tempel-Tuttle starts its disintegration, the process happens at around the distance of earth’s orbit, so a cloud of dust is left behind for us to crash through every year. This is the Leonid meteor shower. Every November 18 or so, we cross through…