#culture and society
Yo-Yo Ma performs Nobel-winning physicist Richard Feynman’s ode to the wonder of life, animated by artist Kelli Anderson – the culmination of the nine-part animated Universe in Verseseries, celebrating science and the wonder of reality through poetic beauty.
Text and details here.
The little-known story of Sarah Mapps Douglass and her consummate botanical paintings – the first surviving art signed by an African-American woman.
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Theadorable doodles Darwin’s kids left all over his manuscript of On the Origin of Species, published on this day in 1859 .
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The forgotten poet Joseph Pintauro, born on this day in 1930, made some uncommonly wonderful children’s books for grownups, long and lamentably out of print. Here is what survives of them.
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The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse – artist Charlie Mackesy’s tender illustrated meditation on how to live with fear and what it means to love.
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On this day in 1930, the Bathysphere—William Beebe’s revolutionary spherical submersible—took its first test dive. Soon, expedition artist Else Bostelmannwaspainting deep-sea creatures human eyes had never seen and the human mind hadn’t even imagined.
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it keeps coming up, but censorship isn’t about what you’re not allowed to know it’s about what you’re not allowed to say, and usually you actually have to know about it so you know not to say it!
for example say the war is going badly and everybody knows it: if nobody is allowed to say it then the government can remain in power and everything is fine, but once people openly say “we’re losing the war” then the government is in deep trouble, because voicing that fact is a challenge to authority.
in China everyone knows that the government was paralysed with indecision about how to handle the mass unrest of 1989 and the army performed abysmally when ordered to quell the disturbance, but open discussion of this would raise all kinds of questions about the legitimacy of government both past and present.
you can think what you like, but if you can’t say it then it doesn’t matter!
