Trivia (should have been 23rd August)

Second Life: 1943
via Shorpy Historical Photo Archive – Vintage Fine Art Prints by Dave

April 1943. Baltimore, Md.
“Trolley of 1917 vintage. Many old cars have been reconditioned because of wartime transportation pressure”
Medium format negative by Marjory Collins for the Office of War Information
View original post

==========================================
How Ink is Made: A Beautiful Reflection of the Analog World we still inhabit
via Scholarly Kitchen by Todd A Carpenter
In this age of digital content distribution, most of us probably think about publishing as a clean digital process with sleek computers, mutable fonts and hi-tech reading devices, rather than a messy, dirty manufacturing process. In fact, even most modern manufacturing facilities aren’t messy or dirty, but clean and efficient. The dance of creating things in those environments is so often shielded from our eyes these days that we aren’t often connected to the process that creates the thing you purchase in a store or order from an online shop. In part, there’s a loss to this, since there is a real art in manufacturing, especially in printing.
Continue reading (and watch a fascinating video)

==========================================
Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Silly and sweet, clowns are the epitome of buffoonish humor. And yet something sinister has always lurked beneath the face paint… more

==========================================
A New Timeline for Mysterious Permian Extinction
via Big Think by Big Think editors

252 million years ago, a massive amount of carbon was released into the Earth’s atmosphere. Where did it come from? We’re not sure. But we do know that the chemistry of the Earth’s oceans changed drastically, and up to 96 percent of all marine species became extinct.
Continue reading

==========================================
What’s climate change ruining now? Baby penguin edition
via BoingBoing by Maggie Koerth-Baker

A 28-year study of Magellanic penguins in Argentina suggests climate change plays a direct role in reducing the number of baby penguins that survive to become adults, slowly leading towards the extinction of the species.

==========================================
Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
The most interesting silence is that of a mind free of words, of thoughts, of self-regard. But if the monologue ends, where would identity be? Scary thought… more

==========================================
Lithograph of the Salem Witch Trials
via BoingBoing by David Pescovitz

Joseph E Baker’s Witch No. 1 (1892) is a stunning lithograph illustrating the imagined events that are part of the mythology of the horrific Salem Witch Trials of the late 17th century. To learn more, check out Smithsonian’s Brief History of the Salem Witch Trials

==========================================
Lawrence in Arabia
via 3QuarksDaily by Azra Raza
Jan Morris in The Telegraph

Force of personality: TE Lawrence by James McBey, 1918  Photo: Getty images
This tremendous book puts me in mind of a huge murky kaleidoscope, an ever-shifting display through which one image remains ambiguously constant. The scene is the tumultuous world of the Arabs during the last stages of the First World War; the enigmatic central figure is that of Thomas Edward Lawrence, a small Anglo-Irish archaeologist in his late twenties, later to be known as Lawrence of Arabia.
It was a populist, even patronising epithet, because there was nothing Arabian about him. This hefty volume, though, by a scholarly American journalist, demonstrates how central he was to the infinitely convoluted, deceptive and contradictory goings-on that were eventually to bring into being the Middle East as we know it now.
Continue reading

==========================================
Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
In the oozy stretches of eastern England, man and oyster have been on intimate terms for millennia… more

==========================================
20 Classic YA Literature Heroines, Ranked
via Flavorwire by Michelle Dean
This week, [nearly a year ago] The Book of Jezebel comes came out, and you should order it immediately – which I say because I was one of its contributors but also because it’s great – a desk reference of every bit of feminist trivia you could want. In particular, I think it’d make a great gift for young teenagers who are still coming up and learning about feminist reads on popular culture.
But let’s face it: no one starts with an encyclopedia, in evaluating these things; you start with the books girls are given as young’uns, and, troublesome lot that they are, those titles give you models of feminine behaviour and independence to measure yourself against. It’s a testament to their formative importance that women, well into their adult lives, insist that these characters shaped the way they saw themselves and the world.
Continue reading
Hazel’s comment:
As always with lists of this kind one can take issue with the inclusion/exclusion of your favourites and with the ranking that Michelle allots to them.
My main issue though is the title of the piece: “YA” literature indeed. I’d read many of these (those that were published) before I was even a teenager.