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

The same physics that makes light refract into patterns on the bottom of a swimming pool or causes stars to twinkle in the night sky also causes DISS.

From Science Daily ● Nov. 26, 2024

“We mourn her loss but it’s a comfort to know that her penetrating works will dazzle, shine and refract in the minds of readers for generations to come,” Farmer said.

From Seattle Times ● Nov. 17, 2023

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

From "Dreaming in Cuban" by Cristina García

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

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

It is also known as a Bravais' arc, and is formed when sunlight enters horizontal ice crystals and refracts through a side prism face, which causes the upside-down effect.

From BBC ● May 29, 2023

The water vapor refracts the intense glare of headlights back toward the driver in a way that actually decreases visibility.

From Los Angeles Times ● May 11, 2023

Sunlight refracts through it and casts slivers of rainbows across the floor.

From "Allegiant" by Veronica Roth

On the opening “Destination,” a winding and refracted character study, swooning strings trace the singer’s own sense of wonder, as she describes a fellow musician whose life serves as a mirror to her own.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 30, 2025

These machines shoot UV light tens of thousands of times through drops of molten tin, which creates a plasma, and is then refracted through a series of specialised mirrors.

From BBC ● May 18, 2025

Susan Seidelman’s new memoir, ‘Desperately Seeking Something,’ traces the arc of American film over the last 45 years as refracted through her singular career.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 19, 2024

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

From Slate ● Apr. 5, 2024

He was conflicted about what he was seeing, a refracted version of his city, one where homes and trees were bisected and mirrored in this oddly calm body of water.

From "Zeitoun" by Dave Eggers

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

In keeping with the Wooster way, he is both revealing and refracting, straddling the boundary between reality and its representation.

From New York Times ● Jan. 12, 2024

It caught the light in the room, reflecting it, refracting it, but never bending light into the heart of its dark core.

From "Scythe" by Neal Shusterman