All of those thousands upon thousands of photographs my father had taken. Think of them instead. Each one a record, a testament, a bulwark against forgetting, against nothingness, against death. Look, this happened. A thing happened, and now it will never un happen. Here it is in a photograph: a baby putting its tiny hand in the wrinkled palm of an octogenarian. A fox running across a woodland path and a man raising a gun to shoot it. A plane crash. A comet smeared across a morning sky. A prime minister wiping his brow. The Beatles, sitting at a cafe table on the Champs-Elysees on a cold January day in 1964, John Lennon's pale face under the brim of a fisherman's cap. all these things happened, and my father committed them to a memory that wasn't just his own, but the world's. My father's life wasn't about disappearance. His was a life that worked against it.
Full time in Afghanistan. The captains and the kings have departed- again.
And there’s the final whistle! What a disappointment for team USA. They began superbly, bigger, fitter and stronger, and made some lovely attacking moves. In the opening stanza, they sliced the opposition defence to ribbons. All around me the crowd was on their feet, roaring their team on, confident this was going to be a...
Beijing’s delta barricades an echo of 1970s Berlin
It feels as if COVID-19 is lapping at the city gates. Nanjing is locked down for mandatory testing of its entire population. Wuhan, where it all began, is under severe restrictions. Stories of outbreaks are coming from different parts of the country – Chengdu in the far south-west, Dalian in the north-east, Tianjin near Beijing....
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Thoughtful post from the NYPL comparing astronomical drawings by E.L. Trouvelot done in the 1870s to contemporary NASA images.
Trouvelot was a French immigrant to the US in the 1800s, and his job was to create sketches of astronomical observations at Harvard College’s observatory. Building off of this sketch work, Trouvelot decided to do large pastel drawings of “the celestial phenomena as they appear…through the great modern telescopes.”
He made drawings of Saturn, Jupiter, aurora borealis, the Milky Way, and more. Here’s his incredible drawing of sun spots compared to a recent image of the Sun’s surface:
Cheery thoughts
Modern life is rubbish, part 78. Britain’s Idyllic Country Houses Reveal a Darker History. An excellent piece on the National Trust’s struggles with context and interpretation, in the face of vocal opposition from people who are seemingly desperate to avoid any kind of self-examination whatsoever / ‘End of the line for Uber‘, investigating a global scam that is leaving all of us poorer / ‘Learning from the Vessel: How cities can be designed to prevent suicide‘. Minimise access to highly visible vertical opportunities / rain noise generator, presumably to blot out the sound of real rain and rapidly advancing climate change / add fast fashion to the list of obviously awful but casually overlooked things: ‘In Ghana, they call them “obroni wawu” — dead white man’s clothes‘ / Orford Ness, home to an Artangel installation by Tatiana Trouvé. Some more images / ‘a door, a window’, a photographic series by Paul Clifford / how to make a bowling ball. But can you ever get rid of it? / the lucky few can escape to an island / the Matchbook Archive / music by lost space department / three dimensional murals by Peeta / ghost in the machine: Sahara Itza Live Chat (via Electric Eel). Creepy.