Let There Be Light

While taking a break from writing this column, I poured myself a tumbler of lemonade, chugged it in one gulp and rinsed the glass. But I was in a rush to get back to work, so my handoff to the draining board went awry. En route, the tumbler took a tumble onto the kitchen floor, exploding into a million diamond-sized shards and making a bang loud enough to make me wonder whether I’d been inadvertently drinking from a hand grenade. Sure enough, turns out the tumbler was made of tempered glass, a safety measure for ham-handed drinkers like myself to keep them from slashing a wrist on jagged shards. This is the first glass I’ve dropped in years; funny how it happened while I was writing about hull windows, many of which are made of tempered glass. The universe works in mysterious ways.

In the past decade or so, hull windows