The Animated Universe in Verse — the complete series, a year in the making, freely available online in its entirety

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[The Animated Universe in Verse: Complete Series]( The Universe in Verse was born in 2017 as part celebration of the wonder of life and the splendor of reality, and part protest against the assault on science and nature — that is, on life and reality — in the era of “alternative facts” and vanishing environmental protections. An act of resistance and an act of persistence. Fierce insistence on the felicitous expression of nature in human nature, with our capacity for music and mathematics, for art and hope. Spring after spring, this labor of love remained a live gathering. Then, in the gatherless disorientation of the pandemic, I joined forces with my friends at [On Being]( to reimagine the spirit of The Universe in Verse in a different incarnation — a nine-part series of perspective-broadening, mind-deepening, heart-leavening stories about science and our search for truth, enlivened by animated poems with original music: emblems of our longing for meaning. Each miniature totality was brought to life by a different performer. Each shimmers with visual magic by a different artist and audible magic by a different musician. Each is a portable cosmos of gladness at the chance-miracle of aliveness: all of us, suspended here in this sliver of spacetime, with our stories and our poems and each other. This series, offered freely to a world ever-needful of beauty and perspective, was a work of love that took orders of magnitude more labor and resources than anticipated. If it slakes your soul with gladness, please consider [making a donation]( however humble — such sustaining solidarity is what makes these colossal exertions of time, thought, and tenderness (which are the raw materials of livelihood) possible. Here, at long and loving last, is the complete nine-part series in a single place: [CHAPTER 1 | BLOOM: The Evolution of Life and the Birth of Ecology]( Poem by Emily Dickinson, performance by Joan As Police Woman, art + animation by Ohara Hale, lettering by Debbie Millman [CHAPTER 2 | MY GOD, IT’S FULL OF STARS: Henrietta Leavitt, Edwin Hubble, and Our Human Hunger to Know the Universe]( Poem by Tracy K. Smith, art + animation by Daniel Bruson, music by Gautam Srikishan [CHAPTER 3 | ACHIEVING PERSPECTIVE: Trailblazing Astronomer Maria Mitchell and the Poetry of the Cosmic Perspective]( Poem by Pattiann Rogers, reading by David Byrne, art by Maira Kalman, animation by SALT Project, music by Jherek Bischoff [CHAPTER 4 | LET THERE ALWAYS BE LIGHT: Dark Matter, Astronomer Vera Rubin, and the Mystery of Our Mortal Stardust]( Poem by Rebecca Elson, reading by Patti Smith, art + animation by Ohara Hale, music by Zoë Keating [CHAPTER 5 | SINGULARITY: An Ode to Our Primeval Bond with Nature and Each Other]( Poem by Marissa Davis, performance by Toshi Reagon, art + animation by Lottie Kingslake) [CHAPTER 6 | DIRGE WITHOUT MUSIC: Emmy Noether, Symmetry, and the Conservation of Energy]( Poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay, reading by Amanda Palmer, art + animation by Sophie Blackall, music by Tom McRae [CHAPTER 7 | THE MORE LOVING ONE: The Science of Entropy and the Art of Alternative Endings]( Poem by W.H. Auden, reading by Janna Levin, art + animation by Liang-Hsin Huang, music by Garth Stevenson [CHAPTER 8 | OCTOPUS EMPIRE: Nonhuman Consciousness and the Wonder of Octopus Intelligence]( Poem by Marilyn Nelson, reading by Sy Montgomery, art by Edwina White, animation by James Dunlap, music by Topu Lyo [CHAPTER 9 | THE WONDER OF LIFE: An Ode to the "Atoms with Consciousness" and "Matter with Curiosity" That We Are]( Poem by Richard Feynman, performance by Yo-Yo Ma, art + animation by Kelli Anderson [Forward to a friend]( Online]( [Like on Facebook]( donating=loving Every month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian ([formerly Brain Pickings]( going. For fifteen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. 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