Sally Mann on the frightening beauty of her children, in the New York Times Magazine. I find this an especially moving reflection. That’s the critical thing about the family pictures: They were possible only because of the farm, the place. America now hardly has such a thing as privacy, at least not the kind we had at the […]
Continue reading →It is 5:30 a.m. on Saturday—the second day of the Wise County RAM clinic—when Brock begins allowing people into the clinic’s makeshift tents. Hundreds of people—many of them with their children in tow—have spent the entire night waiting outside or in their cars to get treatment, and they push forward and crowd the entrance. First, […]
Continue reading →How to Take a Picture of a Severed Head Or not. IS is working very hard to manage its media presence, and it’s working. By Sebastian Meyer and Alicia P.Q. Whitmeyer at Foreign Policy. H/t Alex Horton. Photo via Reuters via Foreign Policy. Mirwan was recruited to document IS’s recent attack on the town of Sinjar, he says […]
Continue reading →Read Two of These and Call Me In The Morning* 1. Cory Doctorow reviews Thomas Piketty’s* Capital in the 21st Century* This is a crisis. The reason for capitalism is that it is supposed to allocate reward based on “merit” – it is supposed to move capital into the hands of the people who can do […]
Continue reading →A not-comprehensive sampling of the good stuff I found this week. (I spent most of my reading time reading Virginia Woolf.) Oh do, do watch this: A poultry farmer, one I could listen to all day, tells Maryn McKenna why he’s preserving the genes, carried in the squawking, beautiful birds all around him, of heritage poultry breeds that Big […]
Continue reading →Making the rounds today is the highly charming selfie of a young Colin Powell: Powell’s photo has that good power a selfie can have: a picture not just of someone’s face, but, especially apparent when viewed later on, of a person’s aspirations and possibilities. For that reason it reminded me of this youthful selfie of Stanley […]
Continue reading →Dennis Hlynsky, a photographer/filmmaker and professor at Rhode Island Institute of Design, has been filming various bunches of birds — murmurations of starlings, murders of crows, and others — with a techqnique that shows each bird’s trail, in images, from the preceding two seconds. It’s something like the effect of watching fireflies, or tracer bullets, […]
Continue reading →Actually it was 600,000. But still: The thing about insects is that they present infinite “contrivances,” as Darwin once put it, to divert your attention. Invertebrate collections like these throw my ADHD into overdrive. While many of us suffered through the polar vortex, Bryan Pfeiffer, writer, naturalist, bird guide, ace photographer, and a man obsessed […]
Continue reading →Bryan Pfeiffer, one of Vermont’s sharpest birders, most engaging and informative bird and dragonfly guides, and funniest people, is on Monhegan Island, Maine, scouting for a guiding trip he’s leading next week. Here’s a bit of his first report, describing some raptors hunting a bunch of blue jays. A young Cooper’s Hawk joined the fracas. […]
Continue reading →Below behold the main library at Trinity College, Dublin:
Image courtesy of Irish Welcome Tours’ Flickr stream.
That’s one of 62 featured at Mental Floss’s gorgeous gathering of lovely libraries ’round the globe. A couple of my other favorites:
Bibliotheque National de France, Image courtesy of Wikipedia user Zubro.
Abbey Library of St. Galen, Switzerland. Image courtesy of Wikipedia user Stibiwiki
Get the rest at Mental Floss.