via Interesting Literature
One of the best-known poems about mothers
‘My Mother’ is a famous poem, but its author is not so well-known. Ann Taylor (1782-1866) was not only a popular poet (who is best-remembered, in so far as she is remembered at all, for her verses for children) but also a literary critic of some repute. But it is for ‘My Mother’ that Taylor is now chiefly known.
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via the OUP blog
Polar bear (Ursus) maritimus female with its cub, Svalbard by AWeith. CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
An icon of the Arctic, the polar bear is a fairly common sight in the news, whether it’s because the polar ice caps are melting or because of a cute new arrival at a zoo. But how exactly has habitat loss and climate change affected the well being of polar bears?
Now classified as a vulnerable species, we will be celebrating the polar bear this month while also raising awareness of the species’ decline with these eight facts about polar bears and climate change.
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via 3 Quarks Daily: Natalie Angier in The New York Times
Esther Aarts
Every night during breeding season, the male túngara frog of Central America will stake out a performance patch in the local pond and spend unbroken hours broadcasting his splendor to the world. The mud-brown frog is barely the size of a shelled pecan, but his call is large and dynamic, a long downward sweep that sounds remarkably like a phaser weapon on “Star Trek,” followed by a brief, twangy, harmonically dense chuck. Unless, that is, a competing male starts calling nearby, in which case the first frog is likely to add two chucks to the tail of his sweep. And should his rival respond likewise, Male A will tack on three chucks. Back and forth they go, call and raise, until the frogs hit their respiratory limit at six to seven rapid-fire chucks.
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via Arts & Letters Daily: Cody Delistraty in the PARIS REVIEW
ALOÏSE CORBAZ, LE RICOCHET SOLAIRE.
On July 5, 1945, the French painter Jean Dubuffet set off for Switzerland accompanied by two fellow Frenchmen, the publisher Jean Paulhan and the architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier. The Swiss tourism board had organized the trip with the hopes that the men would return to Paris with a new view of Switzerland. Paul Baudry, the cultural ambassador of French-Swiss tourism, had organized for them to eat at the top restaurants, take in the rolling hills and meadows, and go to the Matterhorn.
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via Interesting Literature
An important poem about bearing witness to atrocity
Geoffrey Hill, who died in 2016, once defended ‘difficulty’ in poetry, arguing that ‘genuinely difficult art is truly democratic’. Human beings are complicated, so any poetry that is to be worthy of us should reflect our complexity, whether moral, emotional, or intellectual. ‘September Song’ reflects Hill’s dedication to this principle, tackling one of the most ‘difficult’ subjects for a poet to write about: the Holocaust.
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via the OUP blog by Bart Van Der Boom
Architecture bridge building dawn by Pexels. Public domain via Pixabay
Did ordinary Dutchmen know of the Holocaust during the war? That might seem an easy question to answer. Research has shown that the illegal press, Dutch radio broadcasts from London, and even exiled Queen Juliana characterized the deportation of the Jews almost from the beginning in the summer of 1942 as mass murder, destruction and, in the Queen’s words, “systematic extermination.” Allied warnings and even German propaganda also spoke of destruction and annihilation. So did Dutch diarists. Analysis of 164 wartime diaries finds 67 that used such terms to describe the Jews’ fate. That seems to answer our question and confirm what has been the conventional wisdom since Walter Laqueurs path breaking The Terrible Secret (1979): the Holocaust in fact never was a secret at all.
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via Boing Boing by Andrea James
Fun fact: trilobites were able to see thanks to eyes made of calcite instead of soft tissue. YouTuber Thunderf00t shows off a cool fossil and explains the phenomenon.
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via Library Link for the Day: Alexander J Zawacki in Atlas Obscura
The title page for Shadows from the Walls of Death, and a sheet of wallpaper. NATIONAL LIBRARY OF MEDICINE/ PUBLIC DOMAIN
Shadows from the Walls of Death, printed in 1874 and measuring about 22 by 30 inches, is a noteworthy book for two reasons: its rarity, and the fact that, if you touch it, it might kill you. It contains just under a hundred wallpaper samples, each of which is saturated with potentially dangerous levels of arsenic.
The book is the work of Dr. Robert M. Kedzie, a Union surgeon during the American Civil War and later professor of chemistry at Michigan State Agricultural college (now MSU). When he came to serve on the state’s Board of Health in the 1870s, he set out to raise awareness about the dangers of arsenic-pigmented wallpaper. Though a lethal toxin, arsenic can be mixed with copper and made into beautiful paints and pigments, most commonly Scheele’s Green or Paris Green. This was no fringe phenomenon: near the end of the 19th century, the American Medical Association estimated that as much as 65 percent of all wallpaper in the United States contained arsenic.
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via 3 Quarks Daily: Ed Yong in The Atlantic
A newborn saiga calf JOINT SAIGA HEALTH-MONITORING TEAM IN KAZAKHSTAN
It took just three weeks for two-thirds of all the world’s saiga to die. It took much longer to work out why.
The saiga is an endearing antelope, whose bulbous nose gives it the comedic air of a Dr. Seuss character. It typically wanders over large tracts of Central Asian grassland, but every spring, tens of thousands of them gather in the same place to give birth. These calving aggregations should be joyous events, but the gathering in May 2015 became something far more sinister when 200,000 saiga just dropped dead. They did so without warning, over a matter of days, in gathering sites spread across 65,000 square miles—an area the size of Florida. Whatever killed them was thorough and merciless: Across a vast area, every last saiga perished.
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via Interesting Literature
Hardy’s classic dog poem
‘A Popular Personage at Home’ was one of two poems Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) wrote about his beloved dog of 13 years, Wessex, who died in 1926, two years before Hardy himself. However, what makes ‘A Popular Personage at Home’ especially notable is that Hardy wrote the poem from the perspective of the dog, allowing ‘Wessex’ to speak for himself.
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