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Zadie Smith first met Nick Laird when she submitted a short story to a collection he was editing. They were both undergraduates at the University of Cambridge. Her story, Laird told The Telegraph in an interview in July 2005, "was just head-and-shoulders above anything else." Smith's career took off after that. Her first novel, White Teeth, was an international best-seller and won critical acclaim. Later, Laird said that going to literary parties with Smith made him feel "two feet high." Even so, the two writers support each other — showing each other their unpublished work and exchanging advice.

Smith has also publicly described their relationship. In an essay published in the New York Review of Books, she explains that she and Laird work in the same library in New York — on different floors. At the end of the day, they tell each other about the people they have seen out and about, and re-enact the conversations they have overheard (at one point she says she couldn't wait to tell her husband about a cat-eyed teenager in a Pocahontas wig she saw "sashaying" down Broadway). "The advice one finds in ladies' magazines is usually to be feared," she writes. "But there is something in that old chestnut: 'shared interests.' "

"So, like, you're from Europe?" asks Ethan. Despite his talent for spouting disarming bits of folksiness, the fact that he's a mere mortal is a non-starter for "casters" (magic users) like Lena and her cane-wielding, cravat-wearing uncle Macon (Jeremy Irons), who vows to keep the two apart.

The true problem is that when Lena turns 16 (a long hundred-plus days away), she's scheduled to be claimed by either the light or the dark side of magic — a fairly arbitrary event, and something that only female casters have to deal with, for some unspecified reason. The fate of the world is also involved, of course, since Lena's mother, Sarafine, is a powerful dark caster, and her forces are marshaling against Macon's.

This all leads to some truly satisfying scene-chewery from Irons as Macon forbids Lena to see that boy again (and again), even if there are only so many times a variation on that scene can play out before Irons' delicious Southern accent starts to wear. Emma Thompson, too, gets in on the act of overacting with relish as the town's most conservative churchgoer; the malevolent Sarafine possesses her, and she and Macon have it out good in a not-so-subtle scene in one of the town's churches.

Tone in Beautiful Creatures is a strange thing to keep track of; see above as regards camp, teen melodrama and social critique. While Ehrenreich and Englert fall in love in one movie and Irons and Thompson magically and verbally spar in another, Emmy Rossum and Viola Davis occupy individual universes of their own. Rossum, as Lena's seductive cousin already claimed for the dark, isn't so much chewing scenery as alternately screaming at or making out with it, while Davis balances the camp as a friend of Ethan's mother, the only person truly still looking out for him.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer might be an apt comparison, given its appetite for banter, pop-culture references and the supernatural as metaphor for various coming-of-age struggles, but unlike that cult favorite, Creatures can't quite manage to tame its disparate parts into a single experience.

The resulting mishmash is a lot like Ethan himself — full of aspirations, good intentions and eagerness to charm its way into your heart, even as it trips over itself. Creatures bogs down when it yet again rewrites its sometimes confusing mythology, and when its plot meanders waiting around for the days to count down to Lena's claiming — it's less ticking clock than sleepy swamp-gator lumbering — but the movie is at least savvy enough to circle back regularly to Ethan and Lena. The scenes where it's just the two of them talking and connecting as real people glimmer with a magic all their own.

Of all the patriarchs of science, Johannes Kepler is the least known. We often talk of Isaac Newton and his law of universal gravity (and laws of motion, and the calculus, and laws of optics), of Galileo's impetuosity and his telescopic discoveries (and law of free fall and pendular motion), and of Copernicus, the man who put the sun in the center of the cosmos. But Kepler? Sounds familiar; but what was it again?

We need to do better. Kepler is, hands down, one of the most fascinating characters in the history of science. Of course, most of the readers of 13.7 know this already; they know Kepler discovered the three laws of planetary motion, the first mathematical laws of astronomy: that planets orbit the sun in elliptical orbits; that the imaginary line connecting sun to planet sweeps equal areas in equal times; and that the square of the planet's orbital period equals the cube of its average distance to the sun. (These laws apply to any planet orbiting a star.)

I know, sounds kind of boring. But, as with much in life, relevance depends on context. Kepler was the link between the old and the new, a visionary who lived to show that the order we see in the cosmos was the handiwork of a divine mind, well-versed in geometry. To Kepler, faithful to what the Pythagoreans preached two millennia before him, only math could unveil the mystery of creation. The relationship between man and cosmos obeyed the same resonances as the planetary orbits, an expression of the harmony of the spheres.

If his spirituality may seem innocent to us today, we must recall that his dreams of cosmic harmony inspired his work throughout his life. They were the fire that breathed life into his breakthrough scientific discoveries. Kepler found the ellipse not because he looked for it but because it was the only curve that fit the data collected over decades of meticulous observation by the Dane Tycho Brahe. In this, Kepler showed his modernity: if a theory is in conflict with data, change the theory. This was not as obvious in 1609 as it may (or should) be now. The circle, after millennia of prominence in the skies, gave way to the imperfect ellipse.

Nature, not mind, had the last word.

Even if his search for a cosmic harmony, his mysterium cosmographicum, was more a holy grail than science, it represented one of the noblest aspirations of the human spirit, to transcend its mortal chains in search of eternal knowledge.

Today, we can identify similar trends in the search for unification in physics, also inspired by dreams of a universal harmony, albeit one based on the vibrations of fundamental strings as opposed to planetary orbits. From Kepler, we learn that we must dream. But we also learn that such dreams are only useful if, when we wake up, they help us make better sense of the observed world.

Judy Van der Veer is an American author (1912-1982) who wrote books that are too little remembered now. In her works of fiction and non-fiction, Van der Veer beautifully brings alive small California worlds close to nature.

The novel November Grass (1940) tells of a 23-year-old woman (called "the girl") who lives on a ranch in the valleys east of San Diego. Surrounded by animals, she observes the small details of their lives. She notices the cow who labors in pain, then turns to greet her calf "with all love in her eyes."

This is no cute-animal story, however. The girl fattens calves then takes them from their mothers for sale; this the girl both accepts as necessary and as a weight on her heart. Out walking the hills, she finds signs of death:

Skulls of cattle, eyes no longer empty, but filled with grass. ...

The ivory whiteness of these bones made her think that death treated them better than it did the buried bones of men who had owned the cattle. ... Here at least the bones were free of the flesh that kept them from wind and sun. But the poor bones of man were ever in darkness. She wished that her own bones, when she was done using them, could rest cleanly in the sunshine.