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Certain cult historical figures have served as prescient avatars for the techno-visionaries of the digital age. Where the altruistic utopian designs of Buckminster Fuller provided an ideal for the first wave of Silicon Valley pioneers (a group including computer scientist and philosopher Jaron Lanier and Wired editor Kevin Kelly), later entrepreneurs have hewn closer to […]
Jane Goodall, the revered conservationist, passed away today at age 91. In her honor, we’re featuring above a National Geographic documentary called Jane. Directed by Brett Morgen, the film draws “from over 100 hours of never-before-seen footage that has been tucked away in the National Geographic archives for over 50 years.” The documentary offers an […]
A painting is not thought out and settled in advance. While it is being done, it changes as one’s thoughts change. And when it’s finished, it goes on changing, according to the state of mind of whoever is looking at it. — Pablo Picasso In a famous story about Guernica, Pablo Picasso’s wrenching 1937 anti-war […]
If any discussion of medieval medicine gets going, it’s only a matter of time before someone brings up leeches. And it turns out that the centrality of those squirming blood-suckers to the treatment of disease in the Middle Ages isn’t much overstated, at least judging by a look through Curious Cures. A Wellcome Research Resources […]
While our country looks like it might be coming apart at the seams, it’s good to revisit, every once in a while, moments when it did work. And that’s not so that we can feel nostalgic about a lost time, but so that we can remind ourselves how, given the right conditions, things could work […]
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In the past, authorities have authorized censorship on the basis of claims of substantial chances of social disruption or collapse if people were free to hear about religious heresy, alternate ideologies, sexually permissive art, losses in ongoing wars, looming disasters, and pandemic details.
The place where I live was first mentioned in a newspaper on 12th November 1754. It had been raining, the story said, and Samuel Oddy was riding back to Horsforth, Yorkshire, after setting his son off on the long journey to London. He crossed a beck, which was “swell’d with the Rains”. Oddy fell. He … Continue reading "The Long Ago Death of Samuel Oddy, Yeoman of Horsforth" The post The Long Ago Death of Samuel Oddy, Yeoman of Horsforth appeared first on Flashbak.
Africans who were forcibly transported to the Americas during the Atlantic slave trade introduced cultural institutions and intellectual traditions that have been overlooked in dominant narratives of American history, which overwhelmingly emphasize external influences from Europe.
