Know your tome – anatomy of the book. Pair with how a book is made, from antiquity to the Middle Ages to today.
history and literature
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At 10:30 Darwin returned to his study and did more work until noon or a quarter after. He considered this the end of his workday, and would often remark in a satisfied voice, “I’ve done a good day’s work.
Motherly advice from Anne Sexton and other cultural icons.
From the history of how coffee changed the world, early foreign and American coffee-making devices, 1922:
1—English adaptation of French boiler. 2—English coffee biggin. 3—Improved Rumford percolator. 4—Jones’s exterior-tube percolator. 5—Parker’s steam-fountain coffee maker. 6—Platow’s filterer. 7—Brain’s Vacuum, or pneumatic filter. 8—Beart’s percolator. 9—American coffee biggin. 10—cloth-bag drip pot. 11—Vienna coffee pot. 12—Le Brun’s cafetière. 13—Reversible Potsdam cafetière. 14, 15—Gen. Hutchinson’s percolator and urn. 16—Etruscan biggin.
Respond esthetically to all sounds, from the hum of the refrigerator motor or the paddling of oars on a lake, to the tones of a cello or muted trumpet.
How to Listen to Music – a wonderful vintage guide to the 7 essential skills of listening.
Centuries before the ubiquitous Starbucks logo, we had these coffee-house keepers’ tokens of the 17th century, from a history of how coffee changed the world.
It is in our nature to need stories. … Any story we tell of our species, any science of human nature, that leaves out much of what and how we feel is false. Nature shaped us to be ultra-social, and hence to be sharply attentive to character and plot. We are adapted to physiologically interact with stories. They are a key way in which our ruly culture configures our nature.
Jag Bhalla considers the evolutionary basis of storytelling. Also see The Storytelling Animal and complement with Kurt Vonnegut on the shapes of stories.
Mapping the sudden move towards marriage equality between 1970 and 2012, in an animated GIF. Compare and contrast with a map of European laws about LGBT marriage, then wash down with a heart-warmer.
One day last week I pulled up to a four-way stop in my taxi. At one of the other stop signs sat a police officer in a chase cruiser, and at the third, a telephone installer in a Bell Canada van. What made the occasion memorable was the fact that all three of us were women. We celebrated with much joyful laughter and raised thumbs.
Jill Wood
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
November 1980 issue
Letters to Ms. – remarkable selections from the “social media” of the 1970s and 1980s, the vehicle through which the women to whom we owe so much stood together and raised their voices.
Legendary jazz pianist, composer, and arranger Mary Lou Williams, born May 8, 1910 – a remarkable woman in a then-man’s world – in William Gottlieb’s portraits of jazz icons.
19 emotions for which English has no words, in an infographic by design studen Pei-Ying Lin.
Among the most beautiful is toska.
For Saul Bass’s birthday, the title sequence for the 1956 adaptation of Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days, which one brave Victorian female journalist set out to replicate in real life.
Raymond Chandler on writing, with an admonition to define your own success and not fall for prestige alone.
