The fifth annual Universe in Verse — a charitable celebration of the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry — took place on April 16, exploring the largest question we live with: What is life? (The original show announcement and description are below.)

As an end-of-year offering, I am making the full recording of the show available between December 24 and January 1 as a free holiday broadcast, to be enjoyed in viewing parties or parallel solitudes, in fragments or in a single-sitting feast. (Don't miss the especially magical musical-poetic finale, beginning at around 2:33:30.)

While you watch, something to consider: As a society, we have ceased thinking about how cultural matter appears before us — we take it for granted that we will be informed, entertained, perhaps even enchanted, with nothing required of us in kind. We call this cultural matter by the slur under which Silicon Valley has commodified it: “content” — something to fill the empty the screen, of the hollow life, insentient to the human endeavor behind it, the myriad invisible labors and sacrifices, collaborations and lonelinesses that make anything of beauty and substance come alive.

Please know: The Universe in Verse has been a colossal endeavor, to which a constellation of gifted and generous humans have donated their time and talent — resources diverted from primary lives and livelihoods — to offer this collaborative gift of perspective and tenderness. (This recording itself was a gasp of an expense.) If you find yourself come a little more alive while you watch it, if it deposits you back into your life a little broader of mind and fuller of heart, please honor the immense labor behind the love by making a donation to offset the cost and cheer the spirit.

To be human is to live suspended between the scale of gluons and the scale of galaxies, yearning to fathom our place in the universe. That we exist at all — on this uncommon rocky world, just the right distance from its common star, adrift in a galaxy amid hundreds of billions of galaxies, each sparkling with hundreds of billions of stars, each orbited by numberless possible worlds — is already miracle enough. A bright gift of chance amid the cold dark sublime of pure spacetime. A triumphal something against the staggering cosmic odds of nothingness.

Stationed here on this one and only home planet, we have opposed our thumbs to build microscopes and telescopes, pressing our curiosity against the eyepiece, bending our complex consciousness around what we see, longing to peer a little more deeply into the mystery of life with the mystery of us.

For the fifth annual Universe in Verse, I joined forces with my astronomer friend and three–time alumna Natalie Batalha (who led NASA’s Kepler and its triumphant discovery of more than 4,000 potential cradles for life beyond Earth, and now heads an inspired astrobiology initiative as her work on the search for life continues at UC Santa Cruz) to explore this longing through a kaleidoscope of vantage points.

In a majestic outdoor amphitheater built into a former quarry in the redwoods, we gathered to celebrate the marvel and mystery of life, from the creaturely to the cosmic, with stories from the history of science and our search for truth, illustrated with poems spanning centuries of human thought and feeling — poems about entropy and evolution, about trees and mushrooms, about consciousness and dark matter, about the birth of flowers and the death of stars — composed by a constellation of extraordinary humans, from Emily Dickinson to Gwendolyn Brooks, and performed by a constellation of extraordinary humans: writers Rebecca Solnit and Roxane Gay, musicians Zoë Keating and Joan As Police Woman, artist and Design Matters creator Debbie Millman, artist and DrawTogether creator Wendy MacNaughton, poet Diane Ackerman, cosmologist and jazz saxophonist Stephon Alexander, cognitive scientist, writer, and Dog Cognition Lab director Alexandra Horowitz, physicist and writer Alan Lightman, and On Being creator Krista Tippett (my largehearted collaborator in the Universe in Verse animated interlude season below, who long ago kindled my friendship with Natalie). All proceeds from the show were split halfway between a new scholarship at UCSC, honoring the life and legacy of astronomer and search-for-life pioneer Frank Drake, and The Nature Conservancy, whose tireless work stewards and protects the broadest community of life across our own irreplaceable world.

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