Alan Jacobs

I’m friends with our sub­ject librar­ian, and I had talked to her about the visit. She had men­tioned that there were some shelves of dis­cards that the library still hadn’t got­ten rid of. So after my stu­dents and I ooh-ed and aah-ed over the dis­cov­er­ies from the stacks, we headed up to her office. She took us back to the dis­card shelves and pulled a few books for us to look at. “Oh, and there’s this one,” she said, hand­ing me a thick vellum-bound book. She had pulled it because she thought we’d like to see its bind­ing. My jaw dropped when she handed it to me and I looked at the title page: it was a Latin bible pub­lished in 1591. On the dis­card shelf.

1. A knife on a bottle
2. A fork on a glass
3. Chalk on a blackboard
4. A ruler on a bottle
5. Nails on a blackboard
6. A female scream
7. An anglegrinder (a power tool)
8. Squealing brakes on a bicycle
9. A baby crying
10. An electric drill

The New Economy illustrated. Via Twitter

Cassiodorus College: A Proposal | The American Conservative

“Numerous academic studies have found no truth in the stereotype about men being better map readers than women. But some conclude that men design maps for other men, and that women read maps differently, using landmarks and fixtures to navigate, rather than broad spatial cues (large areas and flat lines). Nancy Chandler has been producing highly successful ‘3-D’ maps of Thailand for the past two decades. They look crowded and chaotic but feature hand-drawn landmarks and useful text, as well as colour coding for different attractions. Her maps are bought and used predominantly by women.” — here, with more mappy goodness

Consider forest fires. Until late in the twentieth century we were told by Smokey Bear that “only you can prevent forest fires,” which by implication could only be bad for nature. In the past fifty years, we have learned that many forest species, plant and animal, have evolved with, adapted to, and actually require forest fires. The great Sequoias of California, one of nature’s longest-lived creatures, can reproduce only after a clearing takes place in a forest from storms or fire. Recognizing this, many ecologists and foresters understand that forests need fire, need disturbance. But forest fires are tricky things; they easily get away and burn houses. Still, if we don’t light them, nature eventually does, and destroys houses anyway.

Why do our ways of managing and conserving nature keep falling back to the old ways of thinking? One reason, ironically, is that it isn’t nature by itself that needs to be unchanging; it is our civilization that depends on constancy. When humans were just hunter-gatherers without a permanent home, they could follow the environment as it changed, moving around the world to places that better suited them. But then farming started, and people began to stay in one place. Land ownership developed. With the advance of civilization, cities were founded and became important and desirable. Once people set up all these fixed structures — farmlands, cities, and towns — we became dependent on environmental constancy. It is we who want and need a balance of nature, not our nonhuman companions, whether polar bear, the blue whale, or sequoia tree.

On to a transport map of Tokyo, a newspaper has superimposed the impact of the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1 September 1923. The red area denotes the fire damage in the aftermath of the quake, tram lines are shown in yellow with blue cirles for stops, while the Yamanote rail line is black with yellow squares. The inset shows the Yokohama area. From this terrific slideshow.

Emily Carr’s typeface specimen posters are neat.

Shadow sculptures: portraits of the artists. Via @buffigibbons on Twitter

Reading the Bible out loud is a profoundly theological act. After all, it is no accident that the Christian tradition considered the Word to be first and foremost a person. In oral societies, words have so much personal power that they are treated as entities with their own agency. As Walter Ong observes, “In a society where the only known word is the pure, evanescent spoken word, it is easier to think of objects as words than it is to think of words as objects.” Reading out loud gives us a glimpse of the social conditions that made the identification of God with the Word so plausible. Reading the Bible out loud is also practically useful. It helps to answer some of the most pressing questions that arise from the written text. What did Jesus sound like when he stilled the storm, rebuked Peter, or chatted with Martha and Mary? Does it matter that the only leper who showed gratitude for being cured praised God with a loud voice (Luke 17:15)? When Pilate asked if he were the Messiah, how did Jesus say, “You say so”? How do we know, unless we try saying these words out loud ourselves? Of course, vocalizing the words of Scripture is no guarantee that they will be fully and truly understood. Such vocalization is not even a necessary condition for divine revelation, since God can work through any medium. Nevertheless, the Word of God is never more at home, so to speak, than in the sound of the human voice.