Good Reads

[trysail]

...For all of measurable human history up until the year 1750, nothing happened that mattered. This isn’t to say history was stagnant, or that life was only grim and blank, but the well-being of average people did not perceptibly improve. All of the wars, literature, love affairs, and religious schisms, the schemes for empire-making and ocean-crossing and simple profit and freedom, the entire human theater of ambition and deceit and redemption took place on a scale too small to register, too minor to much improve the lot of ordinary human beings. In England before the middle of the eighteenth century, where industrialization first began, the pace of progress was so slow that it took 350 years for a family to double its standard of living. In Sweden, during a similar 200-year period, there was essentially no improvement at all. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the state of technology and the luxury and quality of life afforded the average individual were little better than they had been two millennia earlier, in ancient Rome...

"William Shakespeare was born into a world that was short of people and struggled to keep those it had. In 1564 England had a population of between three million and five million— much less than three hundred years earlier, when plague began to take a continuous, heavy toll. Now the number of living Britons was actually in retreat. The previous decade had seen a fall in population nationally of about 6 percent. In London, as many as a quarter of the citizenry may have perished.

But plague was only the beginning of England's deathly woes. The embattled populace faced constant danger from tuberculosis, measles, rickets, scurvy, two types of smallpox (confluent and hemorrhagic), scrofula, dysentery, and a vast amorphous array of fluxes and fevers— tertian fever, quartian fever, puerperal fever, ship's fever, quotidian fever, spotted fever— as well as 'frenzies,' 'foul evils,' and other peculiar maladies of vague and numerous types. These were, of course, no respecters of rank. Queen Elizabeth herself was nearly carried off by smallpox in 1562, two years before William Shakespeare was born.

Even comparatively minor conditions— a kidney stone, an infected wound, a difficult childbirth— could quickly turn lethal. Almost as dangerous as the ailments were the treatments meted out. Victims were purged with gusto and bled till they fainted— hardly the sort of handling that would help a weakened constitution. In such an age it was a rare child that knew all four of its grandparents.

Many of the exotic-sounding diseases of Shakespeare's time are known to us by other names (their ship's fever is our typhus, for instance), but some were mysteriously specific to the age. One such was the 'English sweat,' which had only recently abated after several murderous outbreaks. It was called the 'scourge without dread' because it was so startlingly swift: Victims often sickened and died on the same day. Fortunately many survived, and gradually the population acquired a collective immunity that drove the disease to extinction by the 1550s. Leprosy, one of the great dreads of the Middle Ages, had likewise mercifully abated in recent years, never to return with vigor. But no sooner had these perils vanished than another virulent fever, called 'the new sickness,' swept through the country, killing tens of thousands in a series of outbreaks between 1556 and 1559. Worse, these coincided with calamitous, starving harvests in 1555 and 1556. It was a literally dreadful age.

Plague, however, remained the darkest scourge. Just under three months after William's birth, the burials section of the parish register of Holy Trinity Church in Stratford bears the ominous words Hic incepit pestis (Here plague begins), beside the name of a boy named Oliver Gunne. The outbreak of 1564 was a vicious one. At least two hundred people died in Stratford, about ten times the normal rate. Even in nonplague years 16 percent of infants perished in England; in this year nearly two thirds did. (One neighbor of the Shakespeare's lost four children.) In a sense William Shakespeare's greatest achievement in life wasn't writing Hamlet or the sonnets but just surviving his first year."

-Bill Bryson
Shakespeare: The World As Stage
New York, 2007.​

 

[crazychemgirl]

I really need to finish GoT:Book 5

 

[trysail]

...For all of measurable human history up until the year 1750, nothing happened that mattered. This isn’t to say history was stagnant, or that life was only grim and blank, but the well-being of average people did not perceptibly improve. All of the wars, literature, love affairs, and religious schisms, the schemes for empire-making and ocean-crossing and simple profit and freedom, the entire human theater of ambition and deceit and redemption took place on a scale too small to register, too minor to much improve the lot of ordinary human beings. In England before the middle of the eighteenth century, where industrialization first began, the pace of progress was so slow that it took 350 years for a family to double its standard of living. In Sweden, during a similar 200-year period, there was essentially no improvement at all. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the state of technology and the luxury and quality of life afforded the average individual were little better than they had been two millennia earlier, in ancient Rome.

Then two things happened that did matter, and they were so grand that they dwarfed everything that had come before and encompassed most everything that has come since: the first industrial revolution, beginning in 1750 or so in the north of England, and the second industrial revolution, beginning around 1870 and created mostly in this country. That the second industrial revolution happened just as the first had begun to dissipate was an incredible stroke of good luck. It meant that during the whole modern era from 1750 onward—which contains, not coincidentally, the full life span of the United States—human well-being accelerated at a rate that could barely have been contemplated before. Instead of permanent stagnation, growth became so rapid and so seemingly automatic that by the fifties and sixties the average American would roughly double his or her parents’ standard of living. In the space of a single generation, for most everybody, life was getting twice as good...

_______________________

"This is why Rocket's moment in history is unique. That soot-blackened locomotive sits squarely at the deflection point where a line describing human productivity (and therefore human welfare) that had been as flat as Kansas for a hundred centuries made a turn like the business end of a hockey stick. Rocket is when humanity finally learned to run twice as fast.

It's still running today. If you examined the years since 1800 in twenty year-increments, and charted every way that human welfare can be expressed in numbers— not just annual per capita GDP, which climbed to more than $6,000 by 2000, but mortality at birth (in fact, mortality at any age); calories consumed; prevalence of disease; average height of adults; percentage of lifetime spent disabled; percentage of population enrolled in primary, secondary, and postsecondary education; illiteracy; and annual hours of leisure time— the chart will show every measure better at the end of the period than it was at the beginning. And the phenomenon isn't restricted to Europe and North America; the same improvements have occurred in every region of the world. A baby born in France in 1800 could expect to live thirty years— twenty-five years less than a baby born in the Republic of the Congo in 2000. The nineteenth century French infant would be at a significant risk of starvation, infectious disease, and violence, and even if he or she were to survive into adulthood, would be far less likely to learn how to read..."
​

-William Rosen
The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention
New York, New York 2010.​

​

 

[oggbashan]

"This is why Rocket's moment in history is unique. That soot-blackened locomotive sits squarely at the deflection point where a line describing human productivity (and therefore human welfare) that had been as flat as Kansas for a hundred centuries made a turn like the business end of a hockey stick. Rocket is when humanity finally learned to run twice as fast.

Rosen is wrong:

The locomotive Rocket was not the turning point. Rocket was a significant development of earlier steam pioneers, both in railway locomotion and in the use of steam to power machinery. The use of water powered and steam machinery in mills to produce cloth, in mines to pump water started the Industrial Revolution, without which Rocket would have been impossible to make.

A baby born in France in 1800 could expect to live thirty years— twenty-five years less than a baby born in the Republic of the Congo in 2000. The nineteenth century French infant would be at a significant risk of starvation, infectious disease, and violence, and even if he or she were to survive into adulthood, would be far less likely to learn how to read..."

-William Rosen
The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention
New York, New York 2010.

Rosen is again wrong on France. A baby born in 1800 was at significant risk because of the continuing wars started under the First Republic and continued until 1815. The impact of conscription to the French armies and the supply demands of those armies disrupted food production and sanitary progress. A baby in the Congo is still at risk because of war.

BUT a 19th Century French infant would be more likely to learn how to read than a 21st Century infant in the Congo because in France schools were encouraged and financed as a result of ideas in the French Revolution and anti-clericalism. Before the Revolution most French schools had been Church-led. Afterwards they were secular, and remain secular today.

I have an original 1790s French government proposal for education. It intended to introduce free schools in every community of more than 1,000 people, with a set curriculum that was identical for boys and girls, except that while girls were being taught in detail about pregnancy and childbirth, the boys would be being taught surveying and map-making. Both sexes would be taught about how to look after babies and bring up children, and science, mathematics, geography, and of course The Rights of Man.

The 1790s proposal was never implemented. The French didn't have the finance for it because they were fighting wars.

 

[Laurel]

http://s3-ec.buzzfed.com/static/enhanced/webdr01/2013/7/25/20/enhanced-buzz-wide-7518-1374797866-13.jpg

Four years ago, my traveling stripper/escort friend Tara made a guy pay for her services in gift cards from this store. The only accessible ATM in town was broken, and it was a Sunday, so they had to wait until noon for the store to open because of the local blue laws. It’s to her credit, or all her fault, depending on my mood, that I have to shop here at all, because this is the best option for buying groceries on a Sunday night in this flat, charmless, remote town.

There are gentlemen’s clubs and there are strip clubs, and the differences can be huge. A gentlemen’s club has a DJ, VIP rooms, bathroom attendants, and a dress code for the customers and the dancers. A strip club might have a jukebox and stackable chairs, and share a bathroom with the Mexican restaurant next door. I’ve made plenty of money in gentlemen’s clubs, but strip clubs have always been more fun. Whispers is a strip club. The first time I walked in and saw the carpet — a black light-reactive repeating neon mud-flap girl pattern that looks as if it should be upholstering the back of a shaggin’ wagon — I knew I’d found the right place, even if the stage was just a corner of linoleum-tiled floor bounded by low countertops. You could just tell that this was the kind of club where dancers might occasionally wear flip-flops or cowboy boots on stage and where an ankle monitor or extra pounds wouldn’t keep a friendly dancer off the schedule.

It’s not the charm that brings dancers to Whispers, though. We’re in Williston, North Dakota, because oil companies are here working to extract the abundant natural resources of the region, and to do so, they require many men to work for them. Female company is far less abundant than the petroleum resources of the Bakken Formation. It is mobile, though, so here we come, the next sign of a boomtown after the oil and the men.​

- read the full article Wildcatting: A Stripper’s Guide to the Modern American Boomtown (from Buzzfeed Buzzreads)​

 

[pete]

cool, looks like a very interesting perspective on the forgotten little towns of middle america

 

[Laurel]

After high-school football stars were accused of rape, online vigilantes demanded that justice be served. Was it?

http://www.newyorker.com/images/2013/08/05/p233/130805_r23807_p233.jpg

Goddard is fascinated by soldiers, cops, football players. Her brand of women’s liberation is one in which individual scores are settled with habanero sauce or Internet sleuthing—and, if necessary, by demeaning another woman. But she is a heroine to many; she has plans to speak at a rape crisis center in Wisconsin, a men’s-rights conference in Detroit, and an event in New York intended to fight slut-shaming. No book deal had materialized, but she was starting an Internet business, a Web site called creepyourkids. Her plan was to teach parents to do exactly what Jane Hanlin recommended: stalk their teen-agers on the Internet.

In the room where she kept her computer, she logged onto her Web site and showed me her advice for parents: “Bad people may be watching your child post personal information” and “Teens do not think of the ramifications of their actions.” Under the heading “Consequences of Twitter,” Goddard had posted a photograph of Anthony Weiner.

Social media had “changed the game,” she said. “I’ve had a couple people say, Well, you can’t get a fair trial because of that. Well, then, don’t put your shit out there! It’s like robbing the bank and going to the local coffee shop and saying, ‘Hey, I just held up Chase!’ ” She had watched the verdict and the apologies, and she felt “conflicted” about Ma’lik Richmond. But she felt no remorse about her role in the case. “Don’t yell at me—be mad at those kids! Be mad at the parents who didn’t tell their boy children that you should not have sex with an impaired girl. Tell your kids, ‘When shit’s going down, don’t stand there and take pictures.’ I just am, like, haters keep hating.”​

- read the full article Trial by Twitter (from The New Yorker)​

 

[RobDownSouth]

This one gave me the chills:

I begin tucking him into bed and he tells me, “Daddy check for monsters under my bed.” I look underneath for his amusement and see him, another him, under the bed, staring back at me quivering and whispering, “Daddy there’s somebody on my bed.”​

- read the full article What is the best horror story you can come up with in two sentences. (from Reddit)​

Welcome to MY Nightmare:

I needed to quickly run a SQL command to update a single row in an Oracle DB table at work. To my horror, it came back with "--2,378,231 rows affected."

 

[oggbashan]

http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/18v2pj8gwovd2jpg/ku-xlarge.jpg

Reddit recently asked their users, "What's the best horror story you can come up with in two sentences?" And their responses were terrifying! Who knew we could be so scared by such small stories? It's absolutely brilliant and here are a few of our favorites.

I just saw my reflection blink. -marino1310

I begin tucking him into bed and he tells me, “Daddy check for monsters under my bed.” I look underneath for his amusement and see him, another him, under the bed, staring back at me quivering and whispering, “Daddy there’s somebody on my bed.” - justAnotherMuffledVo

The doctors told the amputee he might experience a phantom limb from time to time. Nobody prepared him for the moments though, when he felt cold fingers brush across his phantom hand. -Gagege​

- read the full article Two-Sentence Horror Stories are actually pretty chilling (from io9)​

My attempt:

I sleep through anything but last night I was aware of my wife thrashing beside me.

In the morning her strangled eyes stare accusingly at me.

 

[Colonel Hogan]

My attempt:

I sleep through anything but last night I was aware of my wife thrashing beside me.

In the morning her strangled eyes stare accusingly at me.

"Strangled eyes"? I don't think so.

 

[Balladeer08]

"Strangled eyes"? I don't think so.

'e throttled 'er optic nerve, so he did!

 

[Colonel Hogan]

http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/18v2pj8gwovd2jpg/ku-xlarge.jpg

Reddit recently asked their users, "What's the best horror story you can come up with in two sentences?" And their responses were terrifying! Who knew we could be so scared by such small stories? It's absolutely brilliant and here are a few of our favorites.

I just saw my reflection blink. -marino1310

I begin tucking him into bed and he tells me, “Daddy check for monsters under my bed.” I look underneath for his amusement and see him, another him, under the bed, staring back at me quivering and whispering, “Daddy there’s somebody on my bed.” - justAnotherMuffledVo

The doctors told the amputee he might experience a phantom limb from time to time. Nobody prepared him for the moments though, when he felt cold fingers brush across his phantom hand. -Gagege​

- read the full article Two-Sentence Horror Stories are actually pretty chilling (from io9)​

Adults might think "hide and seek" was just a silly kids' game, but Nathan Cain was justly proud of having found what was surely the BEST hiding place EVER!

Five weeks later, Sheriff Bill Miller told a grief-stricken Beth and Frank Cain that, while the case would certainly remain open, the coordinated, county-wide search for young Nathan's body was officially being called off.

 

[Sean]

Seemed apt for Lit on National Orgasm day.

Six things science has revealed about the female orgasm.

 

[kbate]

If you can stomach the opening sequences, Lauren Hillenbrand's Unbroken is a good read.

 

[Laurel]

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/falafimage2.jpg
"Knights of Glory," a computer game that seeks to unite players across the Arab world. Arab videogame designers want to portray the region in a modern light

On 27th January, President Mohamed Morsi declared a “state of emergency” in three of Egypt’s canal cities. The next day, on the two year anniversary of the “day of rage” which saw some of the fiercest fighting of the revolution, the mood was tense. Deadly clashes between protesters and security forces had continued in the week leading up to Morsi’s announcement and showed no sign of letting up. That day, in an internet café in Cairo, I met with eight young Egyptians who used codenames like “Fire-breathing Dragon,” “The Ghost” and “Hohoz.” They were recruiting men in Alexandria and choosing their leaders in Cairo. They were planning an attack.

These men, however, did not belong to one of the mysterious anarchist groups that have appeared in recent months. They were devotees of a new Arabic computer game called Knights of Glory, a “massively multiplayer” online game set in the seventh and eighth centuries during the Arab conquests and made by a company called Falafel Games.

It was the first time most of these fans had met each other outside the game but they descended upon a small row of computers in the Nasr City district like old friends. As they started to play, screens which normally displayed western games like FIFA and World of Warcraft filled with Arabic script. Some gamers, like “Hohoz” (real name: Hani, a computer science student), have been playing Knights of Glory since it was released two years ago. Others, like “The Ghost” (real name: Bassem, employee at an Islamic Bank), had only just started. They are united by this game created “by Arabs, for Arabs,” in the words of its designers.​

- read the full article No tents, no camels (from Prospect)​

 

[Laurel]

Seemed apt for Lit on National Orgasm day.

Six things science has revealed about the female orgasm.

Good one! Happy National Orgasm Day, everyone!

My favorite bit:

The G spot is real

The G spot is a small region in the vagina that, if stimulated, can produce wildly intense orgasms – or so the popular claim goes. However, for decades, strong evidence for the region's existence was harder to find than the spot itself.

However, in 2008, an Italian research team found anatomical differences between women who could have G-spot orgasms and women who couldn't; apparently solving the mystery. The researchers have since begun teaching women with G spots how to put them to use.​

- read the full article Six things science has revealed about the female orgasm (from New Scientist)​

 

[Laurel]

Old article, but related to the g-spot bit above.

http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/44438000/jpg/_44438911_lips203.jpg

The mysterious G spot - supposedly a route to female sexual satisfaction - can be located with ultrasound, claim Italian scientists.

Some women say stimulating a certain part of the vagina triggers powerful orgasms, but medics have not been able to pin down the exact location.

Researchers told New Scientist magazine they found an area of thicker tissue among the women reporting orgasms.

But specialists warned there could be other reasons for this difference.

The existence of the G spot has remained controversial since the 1980s, when the term was coined as a way to explain why some women were able to achieve orgasm through vaginal stimulation, while others were not.

Some specialists claim that the term has led to over-anxiety among women who cannot reach satisfaction this way, and their partners.​

- read the full article Female G spot 'can be detected' (from BBC News)​

 

[Laurel]

http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/images/Nostradamus.jpg

His name is almost a byword for cataclysm, trotted out over the centuries in the wake of major disasters as evidence that long ago someone had figured out they had been foreordained. Such was the case in the aftermath of September 11, for instance, when Nostradamus most recently reappeared in the spotlight. Today, venture into any bookstore’s occult section, and you’re bound to find multiple translations of The Prophecies, his best-known work, alongside books hotly debating its significance and validity. Or turn on the History Channel, and you might catch repeats of The Nostradamus Effect, a show that explored apocalyptic prophecies throughout history, with episodes bearing titles like “The Third Anti-Christ?” and “Armageddon Battle Plan.” His name and work have permeated our experience of doom and destruction, but the man himself is almost a cipher. Getting any kind of reliable understanding or impression of him takes some work.

Before you even begin, forget the Internet. A Google search of his name would leave you mired in hordes of conspiracy theorists, New Age peddlers, devotees who give him the cloying nickname “Nosty” and credulously recycle the same badly translated lines and outright inventions that people have always cited as “proof” of his foresight. You’ll find apocryphal prophecies, such as the one which warns that “two steel birds will fall from the sky on the Metropolis,” or logical contortionists like Nostradamus “expert” and self-styled prophet John Hogue, who contends that the prophecy beginning “When 1999 is seven months over” can be made a reference to 9/11 if one only reverses “1999” to “9-11-1,” and translates the French sept as “September,” not “seven.” There are literally millions of web pages like this, and the man himself—Michel de Nostredame—is scarcely evident behind all this noise.​

- read the full article Quack Prophet (from Lapham's Quarterly)​

 

[islandman]

Little-known fact: our very own LT rivals 'Nosty' in the 'accuracy' of his prognostications

 

[KRCummings]

I really hate all the Nostradamus bullshit. Why people buy into that garbage is beyond me.

 

[Laurel]

http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/science/Nightmare_edit.jpg

They died in their sleep one by one, thousands of miles from home. Their median age was 33. All but one -- 116 of the 117 -- were healthy men. Immigrants from southeast Asia, you could count the time most had spent on American soil in just months. At the peak of the deaths in the early 1980s, the death rate from this mysterious problem among the Hmong ethnic group was equivalent to the top five natural causes of death for other American men in their age group.

Something was killing Hmong men in their sleep, and no one could figure out what it was. There was no obvious cause of death. None of them had been sick, physically. The men weren't clustered all that tightly, geographically speaking. They were united by dislocation from Laos and a shared culture, but little else. Even House would have been stumped.

Doctors gave the problem a name, the kind that reeks of defeat, a dragon label on the edge of the known medical world: Sudden Unexpected Nocturnal Death Syndrome. SUNDS. It didn't do much in terms of diagnosis or treatment, but it was easier to track the periodic conferences dedicated to understanding the problem.

Twenty-five years later, Shelley Adler's new book pieces together what happened, drawing on interviews with the Hmong population and analyzing the extant scientific literature. Sleep Paralysis: Night-mares, Nocebos, and the Mind Body Connection is a mind-bending exploration of how what you believe interacts with how your body works. Adler, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, comes to a stunning conclusion: In a sense, the Hmong were killed by their beliefs in the spirit world, even if the mechanism of their deaths was likely an obscure genetic cardiac arrhythmia that is prevalent in southeast Asia.​

- read the full article The Dark Side of the Placebo Effect: When Intense Belief Kills (from The Atlantic)​

 

[Laurel]

Here's a rare North Korea Instagram account. Very good pics, worth following.

http://distilleryimage1.ak.instagram.com/45e9f224f67511e2b8f522000a1fbce9_7.jpg

David Guttenfelder. Inside North Korea. Associated Press chief photographer, Asia. iPhone & iPod touch photos only.​

- read the full article David Guttenfelder's Instagram feed​

 

[girlsmiley]

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01771/berlin_1771668b.jpg

“Whatever we do,” he used to tell me, “we must stop the Germans reuniting.” He wanted to keep Germany divided in two manageable chunks — East and West. This man was no Colonel Blimp. He was no foaming xenophobe: on the contrary, he was President of the Commission of the European Court of Human Rights, and yet he believed, on the principle of induction, that Germany could not be trusted. They did it in 1914; they did it in 1939; and given the slightest chance, he believed, they would do it again.

Two decades after unification, we have taken advantage of cheap air travel to show the kids the capital of a united Germany — the heart of what is by far the most important economic power in Europe — and I have to say that my learned grandfather has been proved wrong. Everything tells me that his anxieties were baseless, and that the reunification of Germany has been one of the greatest success stories of modern geopolitics. I look around modern Berlin, and I don’t see Prussian revanchism. I see not the slightest sign of German militarism; I haven’t noticed anyone clicking their heels or restraining their arms from performing a Strangelovian fascist salute. I see a culture so generally cool and herbivorous that the bicycle is king. I see a paradise for cyclists, where the helmetless hordes weave and wobble over the wide and tree-lined roads, and a Mercedes supercar will wait deferentially for a family to wander past his purring snout. The most serious public order problem at the moment is the tendency of Berliners to pursue the logic of their Freikörpeskultur by actually fornicating in their many magnificent parks; and such is the climate of political correctness that they decided to means-test the fines. So if you are caught in flagrante in the bushes, and you have a job, you get fined 150 euros — but only 34 euros if you are unemployed. If that isn’t broad-mindedness, I don’t know what is.​

- read the full article Forget about trying to contain Germany – we should copy it (from The Telegraph)​

Do you just spend all day reading?

I'm only just up to the blimmin' German story. For fuck sakes, Laurel.

Some of us have 9 to 5 numbers. I can't keep up.

 

[Saint Peter]

I LOVE parks!

 

[oggbashan]

I LOVE parks!

I love parks so much that I am the Chairman of the Friends of our local park.

I just wish some of the other Friends would do a bit more of the work instead of leaving it to me.