Magick
Beautiful gallery of medieval magic ceremonies, re-created in a book from the 1960s. I ordered my copy today! From The Nonist:
Can you begin to imagine the amount of time spent by the human race in pursuit of magic? I am not speaking metaphorically here. I mean can you imagine the sum total man-hours devoted to [...]
Global Warming=More Witch Lynchings?
Here’s Nick Kristof:
Here’s a forecast for a particularly bizarre consequence of climate change: more executions of witches.
As we pump out greenhouse gases, most of the discussion focuses on direct consequences like rising seas or aggravated hurricanes. But the indirect social and political impact in poor countries may be even more far-reaching, including upheavals and civil [...]
Henry Jacobs, The Fine Art of Goofing Off
From Wikipedia: “In 1972, Jacobs collaborated with Bob McClay and Chris Koch on a series of half-hour television programs for San Francisco public television station KQED. “The Fine Art of Goofing Off” was a sort of philosophical Sesame Street; each program would develop an open-ended theme, like “time” or “work” in an unpredictable collage of [...]
Mechanismo
Illustrations from an old book of of futurist essays by Harry Harrison called Mechanismo. From the remarkable blog The Nonist. More images, because they’re THAT GOOD:
Books for Stupid People
A great data-mining project by Virgil Griffith: He went to Facebook, found people’s favorite books, and plotted them against the average SAT score at their college. Do check out the link—the chart is massive. But some thoughts on Lolita as the highest-brow choice:
The Year in Racism: Black Rage, Pt. 2
So earlier, Jim posted an introduction to a series of posts we’ve planning, titled the Year in Racism. The starting point was Jim’s observation that the black rage of Kara Walker and Clarence Thomas—on display in a recent museum show and book, respectively—come from similar places.
The themes they offer have huge overlaps. Both Thomas and [...]
The Year in Racism: Black Rage, Pt. 1
The year of nappy-headed hos, the year Eddie Murphy kept quitting, the year of the Jena Six, the year Bill Cosby quit being funny (Or was that more like ‘83?), the year of Barack Obama’s potential, we also learned that Kara Walker and Clarence Thomas are seething with a black rage nearly indistinguishable from each [...]