The Heroic Industry Of The Brothers Grimm
David Mason | Hudson Review | 8th November 2024 | U
The lives of Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm have become surrounded by legend to the point that they seem like "quaint Hobbit-like creatures trawling the peasantry for stories". The biography under review here rather casts them as "complicated heroes" in troubled times. Beset by aristocratic patrons in the dying years of the Holy Roman Empire, their labour produced results against the odds (3,700 words)
Why We’re Still Atheists
Katja Hoyer | Plough | 7th November 2024 | U
Atheists — "pure nonbelievers" — are a minority everywhere other than eastern Germany. Why is it still the case that in the former GDR "it would take a conscious intellectual effort to become religious"? Nazi and then Soviet control helped to break links with church traditions. Plus this historically Lutheran region proved "fertile historical and cultural ground" for state secularism (3,400 words)
Mycology For Dummies
Janis Hopkins | Medium | 5th November 2024 | M
On the difficulties of writing about taking drugs. Much like dreams, intoxication is only of interest to those who experience it. Different drugs prompt different forms of bad writing: cocaine produces "boorish mythology", ketamine results in "struggles with verticality", while cannabis "creates deadening, insular stories". Mushrooms, for this writer, are worth the ordeal of penning clichés (1,500 words)
What It’s Like To Experience Polar Night
Cecilia Blomdahl | Smithsonian | 17th October 2024 | U
In Longyearbyen, the world's northernmost settlement, the Earth's tilted axis means that the sun stays hidden for almost three months of the year. The inhabitants of the polar island of Svalbard largely enjoy this seasonal plunge into darkness, strapping on their headlamps and enjoying the crisp scent of snow. "Life in the darkness seems to follow a slower, more relaxed rhythm" (1,500 words)
from The Browser seven years ago:
Maybe The People Would Be The Times
Lucy Santé | Noisey | 7th November 2017 | U
A love-letter to the New York punk-rock club scene. “1975 is a new world, somehow. Everybody gets a haircut that year, and no one can say exactly why. Psychic emanations are big. The time has come for us to assume our own place in the music, and that will involve an overthrow of what has come before. Life is suddenly black and white with a thin stripe of red running through” (4,950 words)
Podcast: Switched — Part 1 | The Gift. Series looking at the unintended consequences of querying the vast DNA database created by ancestry services. This is the first half of an episode looking at babies accidentally swapped shortly after birth (28m 38s)
Video: The Licensed Fool | YouTube | Short Of The Week | 16m 53s
Darkly comic short film about a 16C court jester who gradually realises that he is the butt of a very long-winded and twisted joke perpetrated by his fellow comics. Occasional strong language.
Afterthought:
"Photography, like alcohol, should only be allowed to those who can do without it"
―Walter Sickert