There are elegant pottery statues of court ladies from the Tang dynasty, a tiny boat carved from an olive stone—it's even difficult to make out the details from a magnifying glass.
The last two years of the pandemic in particular have shown like a magnifying glass the importance of trust in politics and science, as well as in social discourse, but also the fragility of trust.
We can pretend this is a Swiss army knife with different tools in it, and one of the tools is kind of like a magnifying glass or a GPS for our DNA, so it can home in on a certain spot.
My eyes have turned into magnifying glasses; the hideously bright morning light coming in through the hotel windows is being concentrated by them and will soon set my brains on fire.
The men with magnifying glasses now say that the world is not about to end—in fact, it seems that the Mayans were predicting something more like a renewal or a fresh start.
This is true self-knowledge according to Buddhism, which ideally can be acquired in solitude, so we can put ourselves under a magnifying glass with minimal distraction.