JAMES LOVELOCK HAS spent decades thinking about the apocalypse. (When you’re the highly influential scientist who helped detect the hole in the earth’s ozone layer, that’s part of your job.) At some point, Lovelock realized that, in the event of a mass catastrophe, survivors might benefit from a manual of sorts—a text that explains how the world once worked. “What we need is a primer on science, clearly written and unambiguous in its meaning,” Lovelock wrote in a 1998 essay for Science titled “A Book for All Seasons.” The Earth and I ($30) is not that book. But it does explain in digestible terms how the earth came to be, how it behaves, and how we humans impact it. 

Louise Nevelson’s towering sculpture Big Black (1963) is on view in From the Collection: 1960–1969. Nevelson, who was born this day in 1899, fitted together shallow boxes filled with salvaged wood moldings, spindles, chair parts, and other fragments painted a dull black. As a rectangular plane to be viewed from the front, the sculpture has the pictorial quality of a painting—perhaps one of the preceding decade’s Abstract Expressionist canvases, which share its mural scale. With its play between flatness and recession, straight lines and curves, overlaps and vacancies, the work’s visual complexity rewards slow looking.