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

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

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

With Alicia Vikander as a Hollywood star acting in a French crime serial, Olivier Assayas’ series refracts his 1996 masterpiece through a dizzyingly playful prism.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 25, 2022

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

From "Allegiant" by Veronica Roth

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

Every subsequent loss is refracted through that lens.

From BBC ● Oct. 15, 2025

So lifting, the dynamic of lifting through asking how do things feel, refracted into the rest of my life.

From Los Angeles Times ● May 12, 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

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

In my hands is a tall glass with a cool drink beaded with condensation that catches the sunlight, refracting it like a kaleidoscope.

From "Challenger Deep" by Neal Shusterman