Venki Murthy
@neurovenki
Neuroscience Professor at Harvard University. Personal account and posts here. Research group website: .
View of Boccadasse beach in Genoa from the apartment we were staying in recently. "an old mariners' village", says Wikipedia. Incredibly lovely.
Some Carl Sandburg, from his 1963 collection Honey and Salt. Love is a Deep and a Dark and Lonely. #poetry
Vikram Seth's poem All You Who Sleep Tonight from his collection with the same title. #smallpoemsunday
Saw this iridescent insect dead on our floor. Image search says it could be a blue mud dauber. What say you, entomology friends?
Midsummer, by Arthur Sze. "I smell eucalyptus where there is no eucalyptus and locate summer in rain." #poetry
Here in Genova, visiting the group of our wonderful collaborator Agnese Seminara for science. Trying to learn about poets from here. Here's "The Wall" by Eugenio Montale, the 1975 Nobel Laureate (born in Genova, but seems to have chosen Milano for the latter & significant part of his life). #poetry
Sunset in this lovely city - view from Barcola (after consuming some magical gelato from Pipolo 1929!)
Excited to be in Trieste again for a week (visiting @ictp.bsky.social). Knew well the city's literary connections to Joyce and Svevo, but discovering Umberto Saba now. Here's his ambivalent poem about his hometown, translated by Geoffrey Brock. "Trieste has a sullen grace"
"What you say doesn't have to be true. It only has to be imaginable." Not the Almost-Right Word, by David Kirby in the July/August 2026 issue of POETRY magazine by @poetry.foundation
Autumn, a poem by the Czech poet Václav Hrabě, translated by C.E. Janecek, in the June 2026 issue of #Poetry magazine from @poetry.foundation. "Trembling poplar bare as a sentence"
Sad about the Champions League loss, but can't defend the way #Arsenal played and can't say we deserved to win. Hope there's more positive play next year.
From Below, by the amazing Carl Phillips @cphillipspoet.bsky.social, in the May 2026 issue of #Poetry magazine. "To have loved differently, less deeply, more reliably. I call that hope, not regret".
From the September 2025 issue of #Poetry magazine, Samatar Elmi's poem, Our Founder. An ode to Silicon Valley, shall we say :-)
What the world will look like when all the water leaves us, poem by Eraldo Souza dos Santos. #poetry
Not sure if they'll grow outdoor in New England, but black calla lilies look beautiful and brooding in equal measure!
To deodorize that overused Satrapi quote floating around this website (not her fault at all!), here's the final page of her amazing graphic novel Persepolis (rent, borrow or buy it). Quietly devastating.
Some #poetry to clear my head this morning. Peonies, by Danusha Laméris. "Peonies are to loneliness what wind is to the trees".
Preparations of War, poem by the Hindi poet Kunwar Narayan. I found it in the volume "The Penguin New Writing in India" from 1992. #poetry
Evolution seems to have repeatedly converged on a similar architecture in the early olfactory system of many animals. We offer an efficient-coding framework to understand this. Out in @pnas.org now! Led by @jzv.bsky.social, driven by Juan Carlos, + help from Farhad. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...