LOCAL CONDITIONS SUBJECT TO VARIANCE: 9 charts that prove there’s never been a better time to be alive
George RR Martin, Like Many of Us, Needs a Break from Blogging
To Be Successful Stay Far Away From These 7 Types of Toxic People
In the latest installment of Nerdwriter, Evan Puschak explains why Francisco Goya’s painting Saturn Devouring His Son is so disturbing, not only from the standpoint of the subject matter but also the circumstances surrounding its creation.
I am especially fond of Art History Nerdwriter because the first video of his I ever watched was on Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Socrates. I’ve been a fan ever since
The history of “I am,” “to be,” “it was”
Excerpt: Hired By Her Husband | Beware of Greeks | Author Anne McAllister
In the early 2000s, Tara Westover was a preteen living in Idaho with her fundamentalist Mormon family. They were isolated from other people, even her extended family, except for at church. Her father didn't believe in doctors or “government schools,” putting the children to work in a family-owned junkyard. Eventually, she and a brother taught themselves enough math to attend Brigham Young University. When Westover arrived, she fully believed she would return home eventually, marry, and live in the way her father intended.
Today, Westover lives in a flat in London. She visits doctors, has a doctorate from Cambridge, and had a fellowship at Harvard University. How she made that disorienting jump is the subject of her memoir Educated, out now from Random House. Westover’s story is as much about her difficult childhood and what it’s like to grow up on fringe beliefs as it is about seeing the world through the eyes of a singular, intelligent, and observant person.
Westover still has a western twang in her voice, and is prone to voicing her thoughts out loud, showing her quick mind at work. She sat down with Vanity Fair to share some of her story, and her feelings about education and changing your mind.
Elizabeth Strout’s Favorite ‘Guilty Pleasure’ Book Is War And Peace
The author, who just won The Story Prize for her Anything Is Possible, says, “The first time I read it, I was on vacation with my in-laws and sitting by the pool one of them said: ‘Liz, that’s so pretentious, can’t you cover that up?’ I almost died. So now I read it furtively in the privacy of my home.”
Arika Okrent is one of my favorite writers. She’s a linguist who specializes in breaking down experientially rich but conceptually knotty problems in language for a lay audience. For the last few years she’s been writing for Mental Floss — see “The Evolution of ‘Two’,” this short essay on Plains Indian Sign Language, or especially her series of YouTube videos, of which the bit on irregular verbs up top is one.
Anyways, now she’s contributing to Curiosity, and one of her first essays is on the history and structure of that most irregular and polysemic of English verbs, “to be.”
Most verbs stay basically the same in different grammatical roles. “Walk” looks like “walks” and “walked.” But the word “be” looks nothing like the word “am,” which looks nothing like the word “were.” This unusual circumstance came to be over thousands of years and can be traced back to an ancient ancestor of English.That ancestor had three different verbs that gave rise to the different forms. “Am” and “is” go back to one of them. “Be,” “being,” and “been” go back to another verb meaning “to become” or “grow.” “Was” and “were” go back to yet another verb meaning “remain” or “stay.” Over thousands of years, these concepts and forms coalesced into a verb with a single identity, but hundreds of specific meanings.
