February 2012
“The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for 30 years she served the...”
– Calvin Trillin
From Twitter
I’m gonna get a tattoo that says ‘Helvetica’ written in Arial. When a man corrects me on it, I will marry him.
El cheapos
The richest 70 members of China’s legislature added more to their wealth last year than the combined net worth of all 535 members of the U.S. Congress, the president and his Cabinet, and the nine Supreme Court justices.
The net worth of the 70 richest delegates in China’s National People’s Congress, which opens its annual session on March 5, rose to 565.8 billion yuan ($89.8 billion) in...
German Empire, late 19th century →
Health and safety madness
Firemen and police who left a man floating face down in a 3ft-deep lake because they were not trained to enter the water might have saved him had they acted sooner, an inquest heard. Simon Burgess, 41, drowned in a model boating lake after apparently suffering an epileptic seizure while feeding swans. A witness who dialled 999 described begging the first fireman on the scene to help Mr Burgess,...
Say adieu to mademoiselle
It was once the preferred form of address for the fashion designer Coco Chanel and a handful of Gallic screen stars. But, now considered an unnecessary and unjustified reference to women’s marital status, the French government has decreed the honorific Mademoiselle should be phased out from official forms. After a campaign by feminist groups, the French prime minister’s office has...
Anthropology
James Thurber described the “Sesumarongi” as “a backward tribe but a tribe that is all around us.”
The Brighton Daddy Longlegs →
German airship over Moscow, 1930 →
Field & fen, 1887 →
Tiresome
It started with the jacket copy for the British hardback of Richard Holmes’s wonderful “Age of Wonder.” We learn there of the astronomer William Herschel’s “tireless dedication to the stars” (the actual stars, that is, the ones out there in space, before they were superseded — and possibly even outnumbered — by those in the realm of film, pop and sport). This connection between an adjective...
Publicists
A very young Frank Sinatra already had the teenage girls screaming and swooning at his concerts when, in 1943, he hired the best publicist in show business - George Evans. Evans saw that the crowds were hysterical, but not choreographed to his liking - so he took it upon himself to take Sinatra’s crowds to a new level: “[After watching his new client perform in four consecutive...
Central Asia →
WWII in color →
Russia in the dark, 1921 →
Spirit photography →
Rare WWII photos →
Love, honour and obey
In 1769, inspired by Rousseau’s Émile, British author Thomas Day set out to train the perfect wife. He adopted foundlings of 11 and 12 years old, named them Sabrina and Lucretia, and took them to France, where he tried to rear them in isolation.
This went well at first — under Day’s direction, Sabrina wrote to one of his friends: “I love Mr. Day dearly and Lucretia. I am learning to write. …...
