via Shorpy Historical Photo Archive – Vintage Fine Art Prints by Dave
November 1942 “Chicago, Illinois. Engine taking on coal at an Illinois Central Railroad yard.”
Medium-format negative by Jack Delano
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Bad to the Bone: The Worst Children in Literature
via AbeBooks.co.uk by Scott Laming
Children can be innocent, inquisitive and the embodiment of hope. But those characteristics make for boring stories. Sometimes authors enjoy creating a fictional child that is just plain nasty. Draco Malfoy might be a bigot and a bully, but he’s rarely dull and is a vital ingredient in the Harry Potter novels. Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory would not be such a tasty read without greedy Augustus Gloop, bratty Violet Beauregarde and the spoiled Veruca Salt.
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via Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Book and its author
A white male writer is a writer. The rest are pigeonholed: female writer, black writer, African writer. But literature is a way to seek universality… more
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The development of peace
via OUP Blog by Oliver P. Richmond
The story of peace is as old as the story of humanity itself, and certainly as old as war. It is a story of progress, often in very difficult circumstances.
Historically, peace has often been taken, to imply an absence of overt violence or war between or sometimes within states – in other words, a negative peace.
Continue reading and discover that the writer believes this attitude to peace is wrong. Peace is something positive not simply the absence of conflict.
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Solar system drinking glasses
via Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow
The Planetary Glass Set comprises ten glasses (one for each planet, plus one each for Pluto and Sol) representing the bodies of our solar system, very very very loosely sized to express their relative dimensions.
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via Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Are we morally smarter?
A person of average intelligence today would have been exceptionally intelligent a century ago. We’re getting smarter. Are we getting more moral?… more
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Tate Archive has put thousands of artist artifacts online
via Research Buzz by Tara (Guardian)
“About 52,000 photographs, letters, sketchbooks and technical records offering insights into some of Britain’s greatest 20th-century artists are to be put online for the first time.” (Only about 6,000 are up so far.)
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The earliest known Arabic short stories
via 3 Quarks Daily by Robert Irwin in The Independent
The Ottoman sultan Selim the Grim – having defeated the Mamluks in two major battles in Syria and Egypt – entered Cairo in 1517. He celebrated his victory by watching the crucifixion of the last Mamluk sultan at the Zuwayla Gate. Then he presided over the systematic looting of Cairo’s cultural treasures. Among that loot was the content of most of Cairo’s great libraries. Arabic manuscripts were shipped to Istanbul and distributed among the city’s mosques. This is probably how the manuscript of Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange ended up in the library of the great mosque of Ayasofya. There it lay unread and gathering dust, a ragged manuscript that no one even knew existed, until 1933 when Hellmut Ritter, a German orientalist, stumbled across it and translated it into his mother tongue. An Arabic edition was belatedly printed in 1956.
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via Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Reasonable science doubters
Vaccines, climate change, GMOs: Conspiracy-minded skeptics have declared war on scientific expertise. In this debate, facts are futile… more
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You Are Wrong About Chocolate…
via Lifehack by Robert Locke
I have to make a confession. I am a chocoholic! I promise that this article will be as balanced as possible but if there is some bias, I am sure you will forgive me.
The Aztecs and the Mayan people of Central America highly valued the cacao plant and its seeds. It seems that the Nahuatl language had the word ‘xocolatl’ for a cocoa drink which means ‘bitter water’.
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