April 2011
6 posts
5 tags
Human Terrain Systems and Montgomery McFate →
The military uses and abuses of anthropology, from Northern Ireland to Afghanistan.
8 tags
“CHIANG MAI, Thailand — William Young, a missionary’s son who mixed evangelical...”
– William Young, Who Helped U.S. Organize Secret War in Laos, Is Dead at 76 - NYTimes.com
4 tags
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How to steal like an artist →
All advice is autobiographical.
It’s one of my theories that when people give you advice, they’re really just talking to themselves in the past. This list is me talking to a previous version of myself.
Austin Kleon
5 tags
March 2011
3 posts
Indirect Praise: A memorial to the kind of... →
Britain is entering a new constitutional period after a gigantic reduction of local government democracy, also the biggest sale of public property since the dissolution of the monasteries in 1540, the abolition of common land in the 1820s. Even Britain’s public water supply, the greatest…
7 tags
Who?
Sofia Kovalevskaya: the first major Russian female mathematician, responsible for important original contributions to analysis, differential equations and mechanics, and the first woman appointed to a full professorship in Northern Europe. She was also a nihilist.
Henrietta Swan Leavitt: an American astronomer. A graduate of Radcliffe College, Leavitt went to work in 1893 at the Harvard...
3 tags
'Empowering but not consolatory': RIP Diana Wynne... →
One of the darkest and funniest of late 20th century children’s writers. Farah Mendlesohn writes:
Diana’s books are empowering but not consolatory: in many, lonely, neglected children such as David, in Eight Days of Luke, Kathleen in Dogsbody, or the sisters in Time of the Ghost, learn to fight back against the adults who control their lives with careless cruelty, but too often learn that...
February 2011
1 post
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From Adrienne Rich's 'Shooting Script'
Courtesy of the extraordinary Needled:
“Whatever it was, the image that stopped you, the one on which you came to grief, projecting it over & over on empty walls.
Now to give up the temptations of the projector; to see instead the web of cracks filtering across the plaster.
To read there the map of the future, the roads radiating from the initial split, the filaments thrown out from that...
January 2011
3 posts
5 tags
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5 tags
Ladakhi coats
I saw two extraordinary coats today, in a central Asian textile shop called the Turkmen Gallery near Victoria. Heavy homespun indigo wool, cut like frock coats but wrapping and tying at the front. Bands of faded red madder homespun on the sleeves. Extremely full gored skirt, calf/ankle length. The gores were in the same faded madder, with tie-dyed circles of the ‘evil eye’ ...