- The discovery that a microbe involved in gum disease is the cause of Alzheimer’s not only might yield treatments, but could lead to a vaccine → We may finally know what causes Alzheimer’s — and how to stop it
- Cal Newport, author of the insightful (and admittedly imperfect) book Deep Work, has a new book out (Digital Minimalism: On Living Better with Less Technology) that is interesting and a little maddening. This interview captures the gist → Why We’ll Look Back at Our Smartphones Like Cigarettes
- If great scientists had logos…
- I lean heavily away from prescriptive grammar books, but occasionally a titles comes along that manages to avoid off-putting pedantry and show a deep love of words in happy order. Benjamin Dreyer’s Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style is one of those rarities → Meet the Guardian of Grammar Who Wants to Help You Be a Better Writer ※ See also: The Hedonic Appeal of “Dreyer’s English”
- Digitizing the vast ‘dark data’ in museum fossil collections
- Hyperlocal, micro-publishing, “pomenvylopes” and postcards…the delights of small-scale, under-the-radar publishing are myriad → A Writer’s Choice to Be Borderline Invisible [Thanks, Reader K.!]
- Owen Earl, of indestructible type*, wants to (and does) “make high quality, versatile, modern typography that’s accessible to everybody.” And he’s just released *another* amazing “pay what you want” (all the way down to zero), open source, meticulously detailed and documented font → Indestructible Type Bodoni*
- A film trope I hadn’t thought about before → The Art (or Non-Art) of the Cinematic Dictionary Open
- An essential quiz → Tolkien Character or Antidepressant?
- Today is Setsubun, the day before the first day in Spring in Japan. Though the name literally means “the division between seasons” and is more properly called Risshun, Setsubun is celebrated as part of the Japanese Spring Festival. Celebration of Setsubun is accompanied by mamemaki, a ritual of throwing roasted soybeans (“fortune beans”) out the door, warding off evil spirits—sometimes impersonated by mask wearing family and friends—and initiating a fresh Spring start to the year. Modern Setsubun celebrations, naturally, sometimes involve televised festivities with celebrities tossing not just soybeans, but also peanuts, candy and even envelopes of money. Other Setsubun practices include silently eating futomaki (“fat” sushi rolls) while facing in that year’s lucky direction, drinking ginger sake, and putting up small decorations of holly and sardines above doorways to prevent bad spirits from entering.
WEB
Links, links, links…from a certain, uncertain mind.
WEB: January 27, 2019
- February is International Correspondence Writing Month (aka, for the camel-casing cognoscenti, InCoWriMo or LetterMo), in which intrepid participants write a handwritten letter every day. ※ If February doesn’t work for you, there is always National Letter Writing Month in April…
- Arborists Have Cloned Ancient Redwoods From Their Massive Stumps (and the picture of the sapling slays me).
- From the origins of qwerty and why you’re tying your shoelaces wrong to trusting your senses and “black don’t crack,” the BBC Ideas Debunking Modern Myths video series has you covered.
- Paper book geeks, meet the endpaper enthusiasts. ※ See also, the Vintage Endpapers collection on flickr and the University of Washington’s growing Decorated Paper Collection.
- The BabyLand Diaries go inside BabyLand General Hospital, where Cabbage Patch Dolls are “born” through an artificial tree-like birth canal (and that’s not even the weirdest thing)…before exploring the still-mysterious, classically awesome, processes of labor and childbirth.
- Peter Gorman’s Barely Maps are intriguing minimalist maps/graphics/visualizations. ※ While we’re mappin’ it up, see also: The map that popularized the word ‘gerrymander’
- “It’s as rare as finding a fossilised sneeze,” said professor Phillip Manning of the identification of a 100-million-year old fossil of a hagfish.
- “Biohacker” Dave Asprey has made millions convincing people to put butter in their coffee and follows an insane regimen of supplementation, stem cell injections and more so that he can, he says, live to be 180. Guru? Huckster? I don’t know, but it makes for a fascinating story.
- Wow…feast your eyes on the Winning Images from the prestigious 7th Annual Ocean Art Underwater Photo Contest! ※ See also: Wildlife Photographer of the Year: sharing a daydreaming leopard with the world
- Today in 1832, author, mathematician, photographer and Anglican deacon Charles Lutwidge Dodgson—better known as Lewis Carroll—is born in Daresbury, England. In addition to his most famous written works—Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its darker sequel Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There—Carroll was an accomplished artist in the then-new field of photography and a well-regarded mathematician with 11 books to his (real) name. Carroll was also an avid correspondent—recording nearly 100,000 letters sent and received in his personal register alone, (which he didn’t start keeping until he was 29)—and inventor of the nyctograph and nyctography, a writing template and a shorthand devised so he could capture ideas in the middle of the night without having to take the idea-killing time to light a lamp. ※ Previously: Lewis Carroll’s “Eight or Nine Wise Words About Letter-Writing.”
WEB: January 20, 2019
- I’m skeptical of personality quizzes but still take them all the time. I have to admit that 538’s Big Five quiz is more interesting—and, for me at least, much more accurate—than most. What shapes are you? ※ Previously: Uncovering The Secret History Of Myers-Briggs.
- Whoa…the story of Esteban, The Escaped Slave Who Discovered America.
- I’m a notorious purveyor of “dad jokes” to my (now adult, but daddy don’t care) children. But until this article about The Dad-Joke Doctrine, I hadn’t thought much about how they work, despite humor being one of the most fascinating areas of cognition and linguistics. ※ Can’t end without sharing some jokes: Reddit’s dadjokes board remains very active, as does Twitter’s DadSaysJokes…and there are some classics of the genre in the listicle 50+ Dad Jokes That Are Actually So Bad You’ll Laugh.
- The Return of Handwriting? I didn’t know it had ever gone away. ※ See also: A tiny, in-demand restaurant in Maine asked for reservations by notecard — and got 20,000 of them.
- On the other hand: SLOWLY is a smartphone app that connects you with virtual “pen friends” to exchange virtual letters and stamps. “Meet a new pen friend, seal your letter & place a stamp,” all on your phone…and the further away your correspondent is, the longer it takes for your “letter” to reach them.
- Mr. TH.INK feeds my Nutella obsession with a link to The Nutella Billionaires: Inside The Ferrero Family’s Secret Empire. ※ Previously: Nutella: How the world went nuts for a hazelnut spread (in which we learn that the original Nutella was a loaf, among other things) and the Quartz Obsession: Nutella.
- I might have found the culprit behind my (un)creative life: Tutivillus (or Titivillus), a medieval demon of writing and literacy.
- Via Reader B., a peculiar story of a lost Da Vinci masterpiece that may or may not be lost (and may or may not be by Da Vinci)…and how it might be at the center of—and key evidence in—the investigation into Donald Trump’s possible collusion with Russia.
- You might care about the value (or not) of Really Bad Reviews, or you might revel in the copious examples linked therein. Or both. Either way, The Art of the Pan is a good read.
- Today in 1949, FBI founder and then Director J. Edgar Hoover invites twenty-one-year-old actress Shirley Temple to watch Harry S. Truman’s inaugural parade from his office balcony, where he gives her a tear-gas emitting fountain pen. A routine victim of threats and harassment since her first days as a child actress, Temple developed a friendship with Hoover during FBI investigations and would later ask Hoover to perform a background check on her future husband Charles Alden Black.
WEB: January 13, 2019
- In The Guardian: why we are fascinated by miniature books. And when they say “miniature,” they really mean it: the smallest is less than 100 micrometers (around the diameter of a human hair) in width and height and has pages that have to be turned with a sharpened needle. ※ David Bowie’s 100 Favorite Books doesn’t include any miniatures, but it’s fun to browse anyway.
- I hear Grover swearing in this Sesame Street clip and now I can’t unhear it. But, an audiologist explains that it’s all in my ears. What do you hear?
- In The New York Times and in The Atlantic, stories about the discovery of flecks of lapis lazuli in the tartar of a 10th century-nun and what it tell us about forgotten medieval female scribes.
- I’ve featured various kinds of typewriter art and sculpture here before, but Jeremy Mayer’s human(ish) sculptures made of typewriter parts are a whole different thing.
- @TerribleMaps on Twitter. Trust me.
- This American Life‘s “The Room of Requirement” is extraordinary for its range (the Brautigan Library!) and emotion (homeless girl befriends children’s librarian, ultimately becomes one herself, and then journeys back to meet the woman who changed her life). ※ See also: the 110-Year-Old Dead Tree that is Now a Magical Little Library.
- The story of Justin Alexander is one of spiritual seeking, sadhus, suspicion and disappearance in a remote region of the Indian Himalayas.
- A treat for your eyes: Booooooom‘s 64 Favorite Photos by 64 Photographers: 2018 Edition ※ See also: Anastasia Pottinger’s Centenarians and Time Lapse Video of Keith WIlliams Making Geodesic Spheres
- The occasional weird links dump: silver skivvies and Costco’s 7-pound tub of Nutella (plus the Quartz Obsession: Nutella) and HATETRIS and The Influencer who Didn’t Influence and ► 15 Minutes by Tim Minchin and Who is Little Debbie?.
- Today in 1935, comedian Rip Taylor is born in Washington, D.C. The handlebar mustache and toupee wearing, confetti and prop wielding comic was Carrot Top (but actually funny) before there was a Carrot Top. Taylor was a regular on the Ed Sullivan Show, a regular Atlantic City performer, a 1970s TV game show fixture, a voice on various cartoons from Scooby-Doo to The Addams Family, touring partner with Judy Garland, Debbie Reynolds and Mickey Rooney, and a guest on various 80s and 90s sitcom and a part of the Jackass, umm, universe. ※ Watch Taylor’s appearance on David Letterman in 1987, an early 80s interview with Taylor, Phyllis Diller, Marcia Lewis and Melanie Chartoff and his appearance on “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver”.
WEB: January 6, 2019
- Yeet! It’s the first newsletter of the year, which means it’s time for Word(s) of the Year! First, WOTY winners and short lists: American Dialect Society (and nominees), Merriam-Webster’s, Dictionary.com, Collins, Oxford, Cambridge Dictionaries, Australian National Dictionary Centre, LinguiBishes and Geoff Nunberg. ※ Plus, WOTYs in German, Dutch and Japanese. ※ Finally, some grist for the mill on such lists: Language nerds worked really hard on that ‘Words of the Year’ list and Language Jones on the problematic nature of such lists.
- Let the Fountain Pens Flow! is a solid story about the ongoing renaissance of fountain pen use, including some of my favorite pen world personalities.
- The fascinating story of David Maurer, the dean of criminal language.
- The story of Wilson Bentley’s Crystal castles: the first snowflake photos — in pictures is a visually arresting story with a sadly ironic end. Via MR TH.INK which I encourage you to subscribe to. ※ While I’m at it, I discovered the captivating, and occasionally terrifying, profile The Whalers’ Odyssey in that wonderful newsletter too.
- The Mind is a Collection is a “born-digital museum of early-modern cognitive models.” ※ The Mind is a Metaphor is a “collection of eighteenth-century metaphors of mind.”
- RIP Bob Einstein. Many know him best as ► Super Dave and he appeared on all kinds of media since those days, where he inevitably stole the show. Others will remember him as Curb Your Enthusiasm regular Marty Funkhouser, where he provided one of my ► favorite (and most profane, definitely NSFW) tv comedy moments of all time.
- A look at children texting with (often solely) emoji and digital-age language learning. ※ See also: Teenage Girls Have Led Language Innovation for Centuries.
- “Copyrights, patents and trademarks are all important, but the term ‘intellectual property’ is nonsensical and pernicious.” I couldn’t agree more (convince me I’m wrong)!
- I’m “152: Emotions & senses” — Which Dewey Decimal Number Are You?
- Today in 1987, astronomers report witnessing the birth of a galaxy for the first time. The New York Times described the event as “detecting evidence that perhaps a billion suns ignited within a huge gas cloud 71 billion trillion miles from Earth.” Given the evocative name Radio Galaxy 3C 326, this area would later yield photos of one galaxy, 3C 326 North, “stealing” gases from its smaller neighbor, 3C 326 South. Incidentally, a “billion trillion” is also known as a sextillion (1 followed by 21 zeros) and, according to the Light Speed Calculator, light from that galaxy would take more than 170 million years to reach Earth. And in 2010, astronomers asserted that ‘Trillions Of Earths’ Could Be Orbiting 300 Sextillion Stars in our universe, three times as many as previously estimated.
Links: December 23, 2018
- While searching for where to stream some classic Rankin & Bass Christmas shows (the classic Rudolph and Frosty), I stumbled across a playlist of ► Fractured Fairy Tales! These twisted parables took me back. In a good way.
- Feast your eyes on Ryan Khatam’s flickr photo albums of vintage photography, magazines, advertisements, postcards and more.. Some highlights: The Madonna Inn, Illustrations by Zdeněk Burian and Ryan’s “best of” selection.
- The Rare Book School YouTube channel contains some great videos up for those of us fascinated by the construction of books, including ► The Anatomy of a Book: Format in the Hand-Press Period and ► How to Operate a Book.
- [Via Reader B.], the capstone article about the strange Jered Threatin act/incident/performance art piece. As the author observes, “maybe by writing the very story you are now reading, I’ve played a part in carrying out Jered Threatin’s master plan.” → Jered Threatin ※ Previously: Threatin: band creates fake fanbase for tour attended by no one → A fake band goes on tour: Threatin provides a perfect tale for our times → Did Threatin’s Ridiculous European Tour Stunt Actually Work? → The Story of Threatin, a Most Puzzling Hoax Even for 2018
- The SweatyPalms board on Reddit is aptly named. Other possibilities: HeebieJeeebies or AnxietyInducing.
- The New York Times has been publishing some great writing about the people in the technology machine. This time around, a profile of Donald Knuth, one of the greatest and most influential computer scientists of all time…and creator of TeX, perhaps “the greatest contribution to typography since Gutenberg.” → The Yoda of Silicon Valley.
- While you are on the NYT site, explore (and possibly torment yourself) by answering a question you might not have known you have… → What Is Glitter? – A strange journey to the glitter factory
- Lenka Clayton’s typewriter drawings. ※ Previously, in the same vein: Tim Youd and A Visual History of Typewriter Art from 1893 to Today.
- On January 1, everything published for the first time in the US in 1923 is liberated from copyright prison. I guess the death of Sonny Bono and the politicians being, umm, pre-occupied with other things (not to mention no danger to Disney yet) allowed this to happen. → For the First Time in More Than 20 Years, Copyrighted Works Will Enter the Public Domain.
- Today Festivus—the supposedly less-stressful, Christmas-time holiday for the rest of us—is celebrated. Created by author Daniel O’Keefe in honor of his first date with his future wife, Festivus would gain global prominence thanks to a 1997 episode of Seinfeld called The Strike, of which O’Keefe’s son Dan was a writer. Festivus traditions include “The Airing of Grievances,” in which each person explains how the world—and the others in the room—have disappointed them that year, “Feats of Strength,” a round-robin wrestling match that doesn’t end until the head of the house gets pinned, and the “Festivus Pole,” an unadorned pole that replaces the traditional Christmas tree (though this was an invention of Seinfeld writer Jeff Schaffer…the original O’Keefe tradition instead centered around putting a clock in a bag and nailing it to a wall). As Jerry Costanza kicks things off, “Welcome, newcomers. The tradition of Festivus begins with the airing of grievances. I got a lot of problems with you people! And now you’re gonna hear about it!”
Links: December 16, 2018
- Soundscape ecology—and silence and solitude—in Denali National Park (near my old home) → Whisper of the Wild ※ See also, near my new home, the Quietest Square Inch in the U.S.
- The Science of Silence: How Solitude Enriches Creative Work
- “Silence, for me, is neither an absence of sound, nor is it uniform. The silences of the river are different from the silences of a desert. Yet both are vast, and they are full of surprises.” → On a Walk Through Busy India, a Nature Photographer Discovers a Craving for Silence ※ Part of the ongoing Out of Eden Walk, Paul Salopek’s 21,000-mile walk tracing the paths of the first humans to migrate out of Africa in the Stone Age, “a decade-long experiment in slow journalism.”
- “As I browsed subjects ranging from agriculture to medical mathematics, I noticed a sign hanging overhead: ‘Realm of Knowledge and Silence.'” → How an abandoned lab could show us the future.
- One of the better running jokes in Get Smart was the Cone of Silence, which ► appeared in the first episode but featured even before that in the demo reels used to sell the show to the network. The joke got new life in the 2008 film farce starring Steve Carell and then the even shorter-lived farce Scott Pruitt: EPA Director and his top-secret phone booth.
- “You and the voice in your head — whatever you want to call it — are pretty much all you have in the end. You have to hang on to it, and listen out for it.” → The Power of Shutting Up and Sitting in Silence
- “Cultivate quiet spaces or go mad.” — some of the examples, such as MetaFilter, show how various the ideas of “quiet” can be. → Finding silence online is difficult, but the pursuit is worthwhile. ※ Pairs well with The Disconnect, the online magazine you have to unplug from the internet to read.
- “she set to make of nothing most” — I keep going back to some of Olena Kalytiak Davis’ poems because I’m not always sure what is going on, but beautiful. → “SONNET (silenced)” by Olena Kalytiak Davis
- Silence for the eyes: Jason Oddy Photographs The Deafening Silence Of Empty Political Spaces ※ Lorado Taft’s sculpture “Eternal Silence” (aka the “Statue of Death”) ※ Jason Oddy Photographs The Deafening Silence Of Empty Political Spaces
- Today in 1928, the “Shakespeare of science fiction” Philip K. Dick—and his twin sister Jane Charlotte, who would die just six weeks later—is born in Chicago, Illinois, USA. Among the 44 novels he would write before dying at only 53 are Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, adapted for the film Blade Runner, the Hugo award winning The Man in the High Castle, and my favorite, the as-always-mind-bending A Scanner Darkly. Dick was a troubled, often addicted, survivor of multiple suicide attempts who was mostly unknown to readers outside the science fiction world at the time of his death…but whose work has had significant influence on not just science fiction, but speculative and modern fiction of all kinds, not to mention Hollywood.
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- …
- 24
- Next Page »