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

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

“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

But it could not show the mechanism which causes light to reflect or refract, or the particles that cause smells.

From "The Invention of Science" by David Wootton

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

Above his head, light refracts through the water tank, the symbol of the compound’s slow, pointless struggle.

From "Allegiant" by Veronica Roth

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

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

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

From Slate ● Apr. 5, 2024

At both ends of the alley the street lamps glowed through the murky air, refracted into mammoth balls of light.

From "Native Son" by Richard Wright

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

Low-lying clouds and precipitation, they realized, were refracting echoes from the shoreline back to the radar, much as a glass lens bends the path of visible light.

From Science Magazine ● Nov. 17, 2023

Which it did, there was no denying it, the spotty dark glass shattered like a kaleidoscope and refracting the room into a hundred pieces.

From "The Secret History" by Donna Tartt