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“136 recipes over 12 chapters, specially illustrated by Dali, and organized by meal courses, including aphrodisiacs.” → Salvador Dali’s Rare Surrealist Cookbook Republished for the First Time in over 40 Years. Thanks, Reader M.!
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Fascinating history of movable type in China…400 years before Gutenberg. → Johannes Gutenberg was not the father of printing so much as its midwife
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For those of us who don’t have \$625 to spare (or \$300 for a used copy), behold Green’s Dictionary of Slang Online. Headword search, definitions and etymologies are free, advanced search tools (including the ability to search for words by meaning, history, and usage), full historical citations in each entry, and a bibliography of over 9,000 slang sources for \$60 per year. See also: an interview with Green on Wordnik and the Quartz story “This man has spent 35 years compiling entries for a 132,000-word online slang dictionary that you can search for free.”
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I’m revealing one aspect of my peculiar nerdery here, but…you might enjoy Your Postal Podcast, “a monthly podcast highlighting USPS news, events and activities.”
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In Cinephilia & Beyond—an epically good site that I can’t believe I’d never come across before—a jaw-droppingly great piece on the making of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Via Reader A.
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Driverless cars are colliding with the creepy Trolley Problem. An old article, but—as it always does—the famous Trolley Problem get me thinking. Then a Facebook friend reminded me of the wonderful video series ► Justice with Michael Sandel that delves into this and many other philosophical conundrums. See also: the Justice web site including community discussion forums that one can hope are better than the YouTube comments.
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Today in 1854, playwright, poet, novelist, essayist Oscar Wilde is born in Dublin, Ireland. Known for his sharp wit—fairly characterized as both razor and rapier—Wilde authored required reading for page and stage, most famously The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest, along with a seemingly endless stream of epigrams and one-liners. Not one to shy away from controversy, Wilde would attempt to sue the wife of a homosexual lover for libel only to see the evidence her side dug up used against him. Wilde was sentenced to two years of hard labor for “gross indecency,” an experience from which he never really recovered, though it inspired two more important works, “De Profundis” and “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”, written from self-imposed exile in France. Wilde would die destitute in a Paris hotel at just age 46, saying on one of his last forays outside of his room, “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One of us has got to go.” For more on Wilde’s life, I highly recommend Richard Ellmann’s unsurpassed biography.