[gallery] Kilian Schönberger
[gallery] smithsonianmag:
These 1861 Photos Helped Convince Abraham Lincoln to Preserve Yosemite for the PublicStanford University celebrates the National Park’s 150th anniversary with some retro photos
By Alexa C. Kurzius
Read more and see more images at Smithsonian.com.
[gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“19454,19455,19456,19457”]
Mmm… Donuts!Our Galaxy of Images contains a few images from this trade catalog of the Ringer Do-Nut Co. from Minneapolis, MN.
Happy National Donut Day!
That Adler and Van Doren have these suspicions is indicated by their choice of the word entertainment—a dismissive word in comparison to ones I have just used, pleasure and joy, and often prefaced by the adjective “mere.” Graham Greene wrote works of fiction that he felt were seriously literary, and called them “novels”; others, largely thrillers like Stamboul Train and Brighton Rock, he called “entertainments.” But “pleasure” and “joy” are richer words, with a greater range of connotations: there can be guilty pleasures, but abiding ones as well. Adler and Van Doren don’t want to get into these complications, preferring the simple distinction between entertainment, on the one trivial hand, and information and understanding, on the strong and noble other. But to divide the world of reading in this way is to leave yourself unable to account for pleasure, and likely to mistrust it when it comes.So this is what I say to my petitioners: for heaven’s sake, don’t turn reading into the intellectual equivalent of eating organic greens, or (shifting the metaphor slightly) some fearfully disciplined appointment with an elliptical trainer of the mind in which you count words or pages the way some people fix their attention on the “calories burned” readout—some assiduous and taxing exercise that allows you to look back on your conquest of Middlemarch with grim satisfaction. How depressing. This kind of thing is not reading at all, but what C. S. Lewis once called “social and ethical hygiene.”
[gallery] mediumaevum:
Medieval Orthodox illuminations? Look closer.These are actually “Lord of the Rings” illustrations by an Ukrainian artist Sergei Iukhimov. You can view many more here.
Mind. Blown.
[gallery] Tableware for people suffering from Alzhemer’s, via Sara Hendren on Twitter.
I think it’s rather pernicious to inculcate into a child a view of the world which includes supernaturalism – we get enough of that anyway. Even fairy tales, the ones we all love, with wizards or princesses turning into frogs or whatever it was. There’s a very interesting reason why a prince could not turn into a frog – it’s statistically too improbable.
Now Dawkins denies the accuracy of that quote. I just don’t know what to believe any more.
and so it goes, and so it goes, and so it goes, and so it goes
Twitter: LOOK AT THIS AWESOME ARTICLE!
Me: I read the article and didn’t like it at all.
Twitter: How could you say that? You are so mean! You’ve given no reasons!
Me: [explanation of why I disliked the article]
Twitter: You’re going on and on about this, aren’t you? Also, you’re so mean.
Which is basically the root of my disagreement with the left’s writers on a lot of these issues. They look at the state of sex and gender, masculinity and femininity, and see an uncomplicatedly progressive social revolution that just hasn’t fully succeeded yet — that hasn’t brought men, especially, into the sunlit uplands of egalitarian enlightenment — because far too many “traditional” concepts and constraints still perdure. I see a social revolution that has brought good and bad, intermixed, and whose supporters could profit from the realization that some of the human goods they seek are actually more clearly visible behind us, somewhere back in a cultural past they still insist they’re fighting to overthrow, whose actual details the darkness of forgetting has almost swallowed up.