Cleaning out some older bookmarks and tabs here, so some of these go back to January. But hey, at least that’s still this year.
• “Most Canadians live south of Seattle and other map surprises.”
A lot of this is stuff you kind of knew already, but that somehow still seems wrong because of what Frank Jacobs calls “menal map oversimplification.” Like the fact that 13 states are entirely north of the southernmost point in Canada. Or that “Not only is Santiago de Chile farther east than New York City, but the whole of South America is farther east than Michigan.”
• In between stories about the way too many urgent crises in this world, I’ve also seen a bunch of stories lately about a “crisis of loneliness.” This one from Loran Vanden Bosch offers one of the better prescriptions, I think, “If You’re Lonely, You Don’t Need to ‘Hang Out.’ You Need to Get Involved.”
I’ll second that and add one form of “getting involved” not mentioned there: community theater.
Go ahead and joke about it. Cite Waiting for Guffman or the hilariously inept players in A Midsummer Night’s Dream or the likes of Mr. Fish in A Prayer for Owen Meany. I’ll concede every bit of that and acknowledge that all of that can be or often is true of community theater. Doesn’t matter. It’s still a kick. And it’s a great way to meet people, make friends, and maybe even, for a few moments, create or experience something transcendent.
• I read this Matthew Arnold quote months ago and it’s still kicking around in my head: “We are here on earth to do good to others. What the others are here for, I do not know.”
Arnold died two years before Groucho Marx was born, but I still can’t help but hear Groucho’s voice when reading that. There are multiple layers of irony — and multiple layers of earnestness — at work in that joke and I’m not sure whether they’re at war or working together. Gonna keep chewing on that one.
• Marika Rose posted her “Heaven and Hell syllabus,” which is exactly what it sounds like: the readings for a class on the history of Heaven and Hell.
There ain’t a lot of scripture in that syllabus because that’s not where our folklore or “doctrines” of Heaven and Hell come from. The syllabus includes the actual primary sources — stuff like the “Gospel of Nicodemas” and “St. Paul’s Apocalypse” and “Tundal’s Vision.” Those are the texts to read if you want to see what Hell looked like to the people who originally made up the idea (which is made up, by people, as a made-up thing).
• Vanessa Armstrong writes for The Smithsonian on “When a Labyrinth of Pneumatic Tubes Shuttled Mail Beneath the Streets of New York City.”
Pneumatic tubes are cool. They were simultaneously futuristic and retro even back when this compressed-air system “transported millions of letters between 1897 and 1953.” They’re almost steampunk.
Even with cloud computing, some places — drive-through banks, big box retailers — still use pneumatic tubes to transport physical stuff from Point A to Point B. If you work at one of those places anywhere near me, then you probably know Randy, the Tube Guy. He’s one of the last pneumatic-tube repair guys around. (He also has one of the most magnificent mullets you’ve ever seen.)
• The William Turpin Bible (1815)
“Additionally, he granted each family fifty acres of land, a cow, and farming tools–and placed them under the guardianship of the Bush River Society of Friends, a community of Quakers who opposed slavery.”
What happens to used clothing if it isn’t re-sold or re-worn? A lot of it ends up in the Atacama Desert in Chile, where it hasn’t rained for 14 years. As much as 59,000 tons of clothing was piled there in the desert. And then it all burned.
• “Women Maya softballers brush off machismo insults to become Mexican superstars” (via)
Las Amazonas de Yaxunah, are an indigenous, all-female softball team that plays barefoot in white dresses. And they’re really good.
• “A Surprising Way to Stop Bullying”
This is interesting. It’s from “Reasons to Be Cheerful” — a site focused on upbeat stories that therefore prompts an instinctive skepticism from me. That’s reinforced in this case by the name “No-Blame Approach.” But the idea is exciting, and the early evidence that it works is even more so:
What happens next sounds counterintuitive. Instead of being punished, the bullies are invited to help the bullied student. In a 2008 study that looked at 220 bullying cases, the No-Blame Approach, as this method is known, was successful in 192, or 87 percent, of the cases. In most schools that were evaluated, it only took two or three weeks for the bullying to stop.
• From the same site: “The School Day When No One Eats Alone.”
I’d maybe change it to “The School Day When No One Eats Alone Unless They Brought a Book Because They Wanted To.” But still, OK, Reasons to Be Cheerful, my heart is warmed. Happy now?
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In