via the New Statesman by Helen MacDonald
As a child, I lived in dread of jellyfish. As an adult, my horror turned to wonderment, love and awe.
Frankly, jellyfish freaked me out. I loved the natural world, but I couldn’t see how jellyfish fit in it. To me they were incomprehensible, alien things; transparent matter that seemed only vaguely alive. I felt a faint echo of that childhood panic when I opened Spineless and read Juli Berwald’s description of the first time she saw wild jellyfish – hundreds of thousands of them in a tidal stream in Hiroshima, moving past her in a seemingly endless flow of pink, pulsing life. But I read on, and it didn’t take long before this thoroughly engaging book turned my old horror into wonderment, and by its end into something close to love and awe.
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via Boing Boing by Seamus Bellamy
You’ve likely heard of Vancouver, British Columbia. Surrey? Maybe not: it’s a city in its own right and a part of the Greater Vancouver Regional District. Surrey’s got an unfortunate reputation for crime due largely to occasional targeted daytime gang hits and the omnipresent narcotics trade. I lived across the bridge from Surrey for close to a decade. I always felt safe there and enjoyed the food, culture and good times that Surrey had to offer.
But now that I know that it’s infested with feral peacocks, I may not be back.
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via About History by Alcibiades
Sigismund III was the King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania from December 27, 1587, and the King of Sweden from November 27, 1592, to July 1599. Sigismund sought to unite the Commonwealth and Sweden under his authority. For a short time, he succeeded. In 1592, he united both states under his personal union; but in 1595, the Swedish parliament elected the Duke of Södermanland as the regent of Sweden instead of the absent king. Sigismund spent most of his remaining years trying to regain his lost throne. Sigismund remained quite a controversial figure in the history of the Commonwealth.
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via the Big Think blog by Philip Perry
Neuroscientists have known that speech is processed in the auditory cortex for some time, along with some curious activity within the motor cortex. How this last cortex is involved though, has been something of a mystery, until now. A new study by two NYU scientists reveals one of the last holdouts to a process of discovery which started over a century and a half ago. In 1861, French neurologist Pierre Paul Broca identified what would come to be known as “Broca’s area.” This is a region in the posterior inferior frontal gyrus.
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via Interesting LIterature
‘On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble’: it’s one of A. E. Housman’s most arresting opening lines. Why, or indeed how, is the wood ‘in trouble’? What follows is one of the greatest poetic meditations on the smallness of the individual life when set against the grand sweep of history.
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via the OUP blog by Peter Heather
banner header Easter cross sunset by geralt. Public domain via Pixabay
The Roman Empire derived its strength from its military conquests: overseeing territories across Europe, Africa, and Asia. Before Christianity, emperors were praised and honored for their successes on the battlefield. As Christianity took root throughout Rome, it was used as a means to elevate emperors to an even greater status: raising them from successful imperialists to divinely appointed leaders.
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via Arts & Letters Daily: Julie-Marie Strange in The Times Literary Supplement
“The Triumph of Death” by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1562
James Turner was twenty-five when his four-year-old daughter Annice died from a lung condition. She died at home with her parents and grandmother; her sleeping siblings were told of her death the next morning. James did everything to soothe Annice’s last days but, never having encountered death before, he didn’t immediately recognize it. He didn’t know what to do or expect and found it hard to discuss things with his wife Martha. The family received many condolences but kept the funeral private. Losing a child, often described as the hardest bereavement to bear, changed James Turner forever.
Death in the twenty-first century is typified by the paradox contained in this story. Although we greedily consume death at a distance through fiction, drama and the media, we are hamstrung by it up close and personal. In 1955 the commentator Geoffrey Gorer declared that death had become more pornographic than sex. It was, he said, the new taboo and mourning had become “indecent”. Since then, matters have arguably got worse. The decline in institutional Christianity left a spiritual and existential vacuum, while the rise in individual materialism has fragmented family networks and communities. Shared rites of passage that publicly validated grief have receded, and the space of death has moved increasingly from the home to the hospital.
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via About History by Alcibiades
Many Egyptian historical monuments still standing, are covered in writings known as hieroglyphs. Hieroglyphs are a system of pictorial writing that the ancient Egyptians used to record events and stories. They can be read as a picture, as a symbol of an image, or as a symbol for the sound related to the image. The word hieroglyph, meaning “sacred carving” was used by the Greeks to describe the writings on the monuments in Egypt. However, in the 19th century, the term was expanded to other writings, like those of the Indus civilizations and the Hittites.
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via Boing Boing by Andrea James
How birds get oxygen inside their eggs. File this great explainer under "questions previously unconsidered that have interesting answers."
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via Interesting Literature
One of the most famous and best-loved poems in A. E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad, ‘To an Athlete Dying Young’ is a powerful eulogy for a man who is the human embodiment of physical fitness and prowess, but who faces an early death owing to illness.
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