via Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder
Kerry Knudsen is curator of lichens at the University of California. He is profiled in Matthew Killip's short film. Knudsen's intense passion for the beauty and mystery of lichens is thrilling.
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Stunningly beautiful.
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via the New Statesman by David Marquand
If liberal democracy is to survive, the tide of populism will have to be turned back. The question is: how?
A spectre of populism is haunting the world’s liberal democracies. Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election, the narrow Leave majority in the EU referendum, Theresa May’s decision to call a snap election – breaking the spirit of the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act passed by the government of which she was a member – and Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s victory in the recent Turkish referendum all testify to the strength of the populist tide that is sweeping through the North Atlantic world. The consequences have been calamitous: a shrunken public realm, a demeaned civic culture, threatened minorities, contempt for the rule of law and an increasingly ugly public mood. If liberal democracy is to survive, the tide will have to be turned back. The question is: how?
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via Boing Boing by David Pescovitz
Someone on a crane captured this stunning video of a full circle rainbow. Unfortunately most of us never get a chance to see circle rainbows because the ground interrupts.
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via Interesting Literature
A summary of a curious Eliot poem
One of the most popular of the quatrain poems published in T. S. Eliot’s second volume of poetry, ‘Whispers of Immortality’ (1920) is actually more about mortality than immortality. The title immediately evokes William Wordsworth’s ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ – but Eliot’s worldview is altogether more classical than romantic, and his poem is partly a counterblast to Wordsworth’s Romanticism. But even this neat analysis or summary of the meaning of Eliot’s poem may, for all that, be too glib.
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via OUP Blog by Joseph Oldham
Jeremy Corbyn leadership rally 2016 by PaulNUK. CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
Over the first two years of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party, several commentators noted fascinating parallels with an iconic fictional account of a Labour leadership. First written as a novel by journalist and future Labour MP Chris Mullin in 1982, A Very British Coup depicts the surprise election of a radical left-wing Labour Party led by staunch socialist Harry Perkins in an imagined near future. As the story unfolds, Perkins struggles against a conspiracy to engineer his downfall by vehement opponents of his agenda, including figures from intelligence agencies, the media, the civil service, and the US government. Six years later a television adaptation brought the story to a larger audience, cementing its place as a cultural touchstone of the 1980s.
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via Flavorwire by Jason Bailey
Clint Eastwood's final Western, 25 years old this week [of 9 August 2017], remains his most complex and personal work.
The picturesque prologue that opens Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven features a wide shot at sunset, of a silhouetted figure digging a grave – an image of dark beauty opening a movie that is decidedly not a pretty picture. Much was made, at the time of its release 25 years ago that Unforgiven was Eastwood’s farewell to the Western, a promise he’s so far kept, which must not have been easy. After all, this was an actor who’d made his name in oaters, making his name on TV’s Rawhide, catapulted to international stardom via Sergio Leone’s “Man with No Name” trilogy, and chasing those films with the likes of High Plains Drifter, The Outlaw Josey Wales, and Pale Rider.
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via OUP Blog by Alan Mikhail
Edit -1-24 by Dane. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.
Dogs in Islam, as they are in Rabbinic Judaism, are conventionally thought of as ritually impure. This idea taps into a long tradition that considers even the mere sight of a dog during prayer to have the power to nullify a pious Muslim’s supplications. Similar to many other mistakenly viewed aspects of Islamic history, today both most Muslims and non-Muslims think that Islam and dogs don’t mix.
There is, however, quite a different unknown strand of thinking about dogs in Islam, a long history of positive interactions between Muslims and dogs that goes back to the religion’s very beginnings. According to several authoritative accounts of his life and teachings, the Prophet Muhammad himself prayed in the presence of dogs. Many of his cousins and companions, the world’s first Muslims, raised young puppies. In the Mosque of the Prophet in Medina, the second holiest site in the world for Muslims after the Kaaba, dogs were regularly seen frolicking about during the Prophet’s life and for centuries after as well.
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via 3 Quarks Daily: From Phys.Org
A Hadza man sleeps on the ground on an impala skin in northern Tanzania.
Credit: David Samson.
A sound night’s sleep grows more elusive as people get older. But what some call insomnia may actually be an age-old survival mechanism, researchers report. A study of modern hunter-gatherers in Tanzania finds that, for people who live in groups, differences in sleep patterns commonly associated with age help ensure that at least one person is awake at all times. The research suggests that mismatched sleep schedules and restless nights may be an evolutionary leftover from a time many, many years ago, when a lion lurking in the shadows might try to eat you at 2 a.m.
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via the Guardian by Alan Franks
York this way … looking towards the Minster from the city walls. Photograph: Alamy
There are ways, at least in theory, of stemming the tyranny of the motor car in the old cities of England, such as restricted zones and pedestrian precincts – and then there is York. The survival of this extraordinary place, dominated by the great Minster, is a secular miracle, a vindication of No Surrender by the generations safeguarding the old heart of the town and its Shambolic antigrid of lanes and passages.
If you are even faintly familiar with York, you will know that that adjective has a capital S on account of the Shambles, the long medieval lane barely wider than its pavements and overhung with upper storeys.
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via OUP Blog by Robert P. Kolker
Posters of Stanley Kubrick’s films, LACMA Dec 2012. Jane Rahman, CC BY 2.0 vie flickr.
Stanley Kubrick would be 89 this year. It’s quite possible were he still alive that he would have made more films. At his death in 1999, he left a legacy of just twelve works of extraordinary cinema, as well as a few interesting early short films. This is a small output by the usual standards of filmmaking, but it reflects the intensity of care that went into each film and his willingness to abandon a project if he could not get funding for it or could not get a working script – as was the case for his Holocaust project, Aryan Papers, and his science fiction film, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, which was subsequently made by his friend, Steven Spielberg.
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