refract

Our legal institutions and the broader culture refract their policy values back at each other.

From Slate ● May 26, 2026

Apparently, a lot of folks feel seeing people in the real world is too taxing, and it's easier to refract your urge for connection to an app that offers only an inch-deep simulacrum.

From Salon ● Jan. 19, 2025

Wisp — alongside acts like trans artist Jane Remover or Singapore’s Yeule — refract decades-old templates through new lenses of experience.

From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 15, 2024

Unlike the shallow foveae found in human eyes, bird eyes have deep central foveae, which refract the incoming light to a large extent.

From Science Daily ● May 30, 2024

They refract it through their glasses so she cannot see, so she cannot identify the guilty ones.

From "Dreaming in Cuban" by Cristina García

To work around this, I decided to use a 'star filter' - a layer of glass attached to the front of the lens that refracts light in a specific way.

From BBC ● Dec. 25, 2025

We might be told that color has something to do with light, or even be shown a prism, through which light refracts to produce a rainbow.

From Salon ● Nov. 16, 2024

“Brat” was the critical and commercial peak of Charli’s career, and the academy rewarded her up and down the program, with a second-highest seven nominations for a messy meta-rave about how fame refracts femininity.

From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 8, 2024

In the retina of an animal's eye, there is a small pit called the fovea that refracts the light entering the eye.

From Science Daily ● May 30, 2024

Of course—he had forgotten that water refracts, bends light.

From "Hatchet" by Gary Paulsen

The French come closest to a grand national idea—liberté, egalité, fraternité, although this is refracted through repeated failures to convert those principles into stable governance.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 2, 2026

What it also made clear is that Coachella is no longer a single cultural event but several overlapping ones divided across weekends, refracted through screens and increasingly calibrated for different audiences altogether.

From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 26, 2026

Every subsequent loss is refracted through that lens.

From BBC ● Oct. 15, 2025

The reddish color comes from the light being refracted by particles in the atmosphere.

From Slate ● Apr. 5, 2024

The faint light all about, quivering and sourceless, refracted in the rain of drifting soot.

From "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy

Mr. Self has great fun refracting the details of who did what to whom and where.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Mar. 20, 2026

Democritus believed that light refracting through atoms caused the phenomenon that we perceive and describe conventionally, or by mutual agreement, as color.

From Salon ● Nov. 16, 2024

Smartphones can act as anxiety incubators, amplifying the sense of abundant possibility like a prism refracting light.

From Slate ● Aug. 3, 2024

Light travels at different speeds when passing through different media -- air, water, the human eye -- and those changes in speed correspond to the light refracting, or bending, at different angles.

From Science Daily ● Oct. 23, 2023

I wondered if there was a big fire somewhere, but in the morning Lori told me that the orange glow came from the air pollution refracting the light off the streets and buildings.

From "The Glass Castle" by Jeannette Walls