Paper fan covered with ca. 1890-1900 scraps, via Paper of the Past.
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Daniel Rabel: Première entrée des fantômes, quatre figures (First entrance of ghosts, four figures). Costume design for ballet. 1632. Via Geisterseher.
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A. J. Johnson (photographs), William G. FitzGerald: A Human Alphabet, The Strand Magazine, 1897. Via Letterform Archive.
Three pages from a Tibetian ceremonial music score with 'notation for voice, drums, horns, trumpet, and cymbals,' via Stephen Ellcock.
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Hua Hsu, "Affect Theory and the New Age of Anxiety: How Laurie Berlant's cultural criticism predicted the Trumping of politics." The New Yorker, 3/25/2019.
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Namwali Serpell, "The Banality of Empathy," NYR Daily, 3/2/2019. A terrific, troubling essay taking apart the myth 'that art promotes empathy.'
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Related: "Reconsidering the role of empathy in Hannah Arendt's concept of enlarged mentality."
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Brodgar bench, by Gareth Neal and Kevin Gauld for The New Craftsman (photo found at Colourful Beautiful Things).
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Three pages from a Tibetian ceremonial music score with 'notation for voice, drums, horns, trumpet, and cymbals,' via Stephen Ellcock.
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In sentimental fiction, we encounter righteous solutions to problems that feel unresolvable in real life. Berlant held that American popular culture had been built, layer by layer, from “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” to “The Simpsons,” upon the assumption that identifying with “someone else’s stress, pain, or humiliated identity” could change you. “Popular culture relies on keeping sacrosanct this aspect of sentimentality—that ‘underneath’ we are all alike,” she observed.
Everyone has heartstrings. Over time, she wrote, we had grown addicted to having them pulled, rather than focussing on what the pulling could accomplish by way of political change. We’d replaced tangible action with affective experience. “What does it mean for the theory and practice of social transformation,” she asked in a 1999 essay, “when feeling good becomes evidence of justice’s triumph?” Somewhere along the way, doing good had come to seem irrelevant—or maybe just felt impossible.
Hua Hsu, "Affect Theory and the New Age of Anxiety: How Laurie Berlant's cultural criticism predicted the Trumping of politics." The New Yorker, 3/25/2019.
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Empathy is, in a word, selfish. In his bracing and persuasive 2016 book Against Empathy, Paul Bloom writes, “Empathy is a spotlight focusing on certain people in the here and now… Empathy is biased… It is shortsighted.” Bloom helpfully distinguishes between the more useful cognitive empathy—understanding what’s happening in other minds and bodies—and emotional empathy, trying to feel like or even as someone else. With a simple thought experiment—you pass by a lake where a child is drowning—Bloom shows that emotional empathy is often beside the point for moral action. You don’t have to feel the suffocation, the clutch of a throat gasping for air, to save someone.
Namwali Serpell, "The Banality of Empathy," NYR Daily, 3/2/2019. A terrific, troubling essay taking apart the myth 'that art promotes empathy.'
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Related: "Reconsidering the role of empathy in Hannah Arendt's concept of enlarged mentality."
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The difference between millions and billions.
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Fairy tale-ish: the hallucinatory realism of Rachel Ingalls; a new book by Helen Oyeyemi (YAY).
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Gravestones, clouds, flowers: the Romantic paintings of Matvey Levenstein.
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Emily Wilson on translating the deaths of the slave women in The Odyssey.
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Batia Suter's Cloud Service — a book of cloud and cloudlike pictures "interested in the visual dialog that emerges with the simple act of placing images in new relation to one another."
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In the nineteen-eighties, Apple called its headquarters the Robot Factory. “To understand the electronics industry is simple: every time someone says ‘robot,’ simply picture a woman of color,” [Louis] Hyman advises. One in five electronics companies used no automation at all, and the rest used very little. Seagate’s disk drives were assembled by women in Singapore. Hewlett-Packard hired so many temporary workers that it started its own temp agency. The most important technology in the electronics industry, as Hyman points out, was the fingernail.
Jill Lepore, "Are Robots Competing for Your Job?" The New Yorker, 3/4/2019.
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Teju Cole, in conversation with Krista Tippett for On Being: "There’s a beautiful Inuit word, qarrtsiluni. It means 'sitting together in the dark, waiting for something to happen.'"
