[gallery] Now this is a great idea.
The most fascinating and, in many ways, cheering story of 2014 is almost wholly counterintuitive: the survival of the printed book.
[gallery] homelimag:
Vega Cottage on an Island in Norway by Kolman Boye Architectsfrom Homeli.co.uk ~ { Facebook | Twitter | Tumblr }
[gallery] homelimag:
Elqui Domos Astronomical Hotel for Star Gazers by Rodrigo Duque Mottafrom Homeli.co.uk ~ { Facebook | Twitter | Tumblr }
[gallery] Uneven Growth at MoMA
[gallery] lindahall:
Etienne Trouvelot – Scientist of the Day
Etienne Trouvelot, a French painter turned American astronomical artist, was born Dec. 26, 1827.
Today many of the communal forms of life that might once have been thought to link the fates of the strong and weak are attenuated or all but dissolved. There has been extraordinary geographic sorting, a result of extensive educational sorting (even President Obama sends his daughters to the Sidwell Friends School). We are engaged in the human equivalent of strip mining, identifying “rational and industrious” young people in every city and town and hamlet through standardized testing, extracting them for processing at one of our refining centres (universities), and then excreting them now as productive units of economic production to be conveyed to an hub of economic activity while leaving behind a landscape stripped bare of talented and industrious people that God thought wise to distribute widely.
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The death of Stephen the Protomartyr; woodcut from ‘Liber Festivalis’ (Oxford, 1486); Lambeth Palace Library
The response that I both respect the most, and which discourages me the most, is this one: black people should not have to debate their intellectual equality. And indeed, it’s true. They shouldn’t have to. But I don’t know what that “should” means. I don’t know what it refers to. I don’t know what valence it has. What does should have to do with anything? Eric Garner should be alive. Chelsea Manning should be free. The poor should be clothed and fed. Racism should be over. Of course black people shouldn’t have to debate their intellectual equality, and it’s nice that in progressive environs, they largely don’t have to. But America writ large does not operate by the social norms of lefty Twitter, and the effects of the presumption of black stupidity are pernicious and destructive, and so that should has no meaning, to me. Lots of things should be, and aren’t, and so you are forced to deal with the world as it is.The word “should” is the worst thing that ever happened to the left. “Should” has become a virus in the contemporary left, a word that is more effective at defeating left-wing resistance than any right-wing argument ever could be. It seems like every day I read fellow leftists telling me what they should and shouldn’t have to do, rather than what they are compelled by injustice to do. “Feminists should not have to teach people the importance of feminism; it’s their responsibility to educate themselves.” Perhaps it is. But they won’t educate themselves. No one will make the world a just place but us. That’s why there is such a thing as feminism. The struggle exists precisely because the world does not fix itself and its people do not educate themselves. That’s such a basic statement of political principles it frightens me that it has to be said at all.