Another ten interesting items before I log off for the weekend

Collar the lot! Britain’s policy of internment during the Second World War
via National Archives by Roger Kershaw
Seventy-five years ago today [it was 75 years when this was originally posted] on 2 July 1940, the SS Arandora Star, a British passenger ship of the Blue Star Line, was torpedoed and sunk in the Atlantic en route to St John’s, Newfoundland. On board were 712 Italians, 438 Germans (including Nazi sympathisers and Jewish refugees), and 374 British seaman and soldiers. Over half lost their lives. How did this tragedy happen and why were these foreign nationals classed as ‘enemy aliens’ being transported to Canada? To answer this, we need to understand more about the British policy of internment during the Second World War.
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Memento Mori: the beautiful ways we have kept the dead among the living
via Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow

Art historian Paul Koudounaris travelled the world, visiting 30 countries to document the practices—ancient to modern, solemn to joyous—by which human remains are displayed. From good luck charms to genocide memorials, his gorgeous art book Memento Mori collects the finds.
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A plague on all their houses
via Prospero by N.M.

June 7th 1665 was an unnaturally hot London day, the hottest that Samuel Pepys had experienced in his 32 years. Sapped by the “mighty heat”, this naval bureaucrat got home late and spent the next few hours pacing in his garden at Seething Lane. He had a lot on his mind. There had been no word of the English fleet that was fighting against the Dutch, and he was worried that his young wife Elizabeth had not yet returned from Gravesend (she had been delayed by an oncoming thunderstorm). But the deeper cause of his unease was something he had seen earlier in the day: two or three houses in Drury Lane with red crosses and “Lord have mercy upon us” painted on their door. Here was confirmation that the plague from Amsterdam, known to have reached England’s shores in early spring, had arrived in the capital. Suddenly aware of his body odour, Pepys stepped out to buy a roll of tobacco “to smell to and chaw”, hoping its medicinal properties would preserve him in the days ahead.
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Yosemite Cadillac: 1919
via Shorpy Historical Photo Archive – Vintage Fine Art Prints by Dave

The high Sierras circa 1919
“Cadillac touring car at Yosemite in snow”
With the Sentinel Hotel in the background
6½x8½ inch glass negative
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Are There Logical Limits to Self-Maximization?
via Big Think by Jag Bhalla

Both biology and economics are in the “productivity selection” business. Comparing them yields lessons.
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This is quite a short article, as most Big Think items are, but if you spend time as I did following even a few of the links you will get caught up in an interesting time suck.

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Dusting the Furniture of Our Minds
via 3 Quarks Daily: Michael Marder in the New York Times

Dust is everywhere. We contribute to its multiplication through our polluting industries, by wearing clothes and using things around us, and in the course of merely living — shedding skin cells, hair, and other byproducts of our life.
But we also are it. Both the Bible and William Shakespeare would have us believe as much. “Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return,” Adam and Eve are told in Genesis. Hamlet, in his nihilistic soliloquy, asks rhetorically about the human, “What is this quintessence of dust?” Science, of course, has provided some actual basis for this notion in findings indicating that the most fundamental material of life on earth originated in the “dust” of long-dead stars.
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Oxford’s Influential Inklings
via Arts & Letters Daily: Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski in The Chronicle Review

During the hectic middle decades of the 20th century, from the end of the Great Depression through the Second World War and into the 1950s, a small circle of intellectuals gathered weekly in and around the University of Oxford to drink, smoke, quip, cavil, read aloud their works in progress, and endure or enjoy with as much grace as they could muster the sometimes blistering critiques that followed. This erudite club included writers and painters, philologists and physicians, historians and theologians, soldiers and actors. They called themselves, with typical self-effacing humor, the Inklings.
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Who was Amelia Edwards?
via OUP Blog by Penelope Tuson

Surprisingly few people have heard of Amelia Edwards. Archaeologists know her as the founder of the Egyptian Exploration Fund, set up in 1882, and the Department of Egyptology at University College London, created in 1892 through a bequest on her death. The first Edwards Professor, Flinders Petrie, was appointed on Amelia’s recommendation and her name is still attached to the Chair of Egyptian Archaeology.
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Fitzgerald’s greatest novel: It’s not the one everyone thinks it is
via 3 Quarks Daily: Taki in Spectator

Fitzgerald was famously obsessed with the mysteries of great wealth, but back then wealth was something new among Americans. Poor old Scott wrote more about the ruinous effects of wealth, which is a very large theme even today. I recently read a couple of articles on Fitzgerald, one claiming that he wrote Gatsby in Great Neck, Long Island, where the action takes place, the other that he wrote the greatest of American novels in Antibes. I believe both writers are correct. Fitzgerald started the novel in Long Island and finished it in Antibes. Detective Taki solves the riddle in one short declarative sentence.
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