Stendhal syndrome: Every year, dozens of tourists are rushed to Florence’s hospitals, physically overcome by paintings, sculptures, and frescoes... more »
How to Fix Grocery Stores: The Chewy Decimal System
Hank Green believes how grocery stores are organized is broken. (True.) His solution is to take inspiration from libraries and organize the shelves of every grocery store in the entire world according to the Chewy Decimal System.
TIL that maybe librarians don’t like the Dewey Decimal System?
Dewey sucks so much and it’s never going away. It was designed in a 19th century white dude mindset that splits religion (200-299) into Christianity (200-289) and Other (290-299), sections books about indigenous peoples in the history section (900s) rather than the culture section (300s) as if they don’t continue to exist, and arbitrarily separates wild animals (in the 500s) from pets and working animals (600s). It’s particularly unintuitive for kids, who often are taught it before they’re taught what decimals are, and has multiple better alternatives that aren’t used because it’s financially unfeasible for large collections to be changed.
These historians oversee unbiased accounts of U.S. foreign policy
Washington Post – Trump fired them all. The volumes of the Foreign Relations of the United States have been written since Abraham Lincoln’s time [no paywall] The Historical Advisory Committee — “the HAC,” in Washington lingo — is made up of nine academics nominated to serve rotating terms by the biggest and most prestigious associations in the discipline.
That’s what the 1991 statute mandated: “Huge volumes, bound in the timeless, red buckram linen of legacy books, are historians’ gold — and crucial to the nation’s understanding of how U.S. foreign policy is made. There is a dispatchfrom Japan to President Abraham Lincoln’s administration describing the “bloody affair” of July 1861, the “daring and murderous attacks” by samurai warriors on British diplomats stationed in Edo, now known as Tokyo.
There is the top-secret report that pushed President Harry S. Truman to authorize covert actions in peacetime in 1947 to counter the “vicious psychological efforts” by the Soviet Union. And then there’s the telegram handed over at 12:15 p.m. on April 18, 1961, from Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev to President John F. Kennedy hours after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba, warning that the action endangers peace “for the whole world.
… It is a secret to no one that the armed bands invading this country were trained, equipped and armed in the United States of America.”
An advisory committee of diverse historians helps ensure that the record of America’s history — especially classified and covert actions — remains unbiased, transparent and thorough. President Donald Trump just fired all of the members of the committee. These advisers help oversee the exhaustive publication series called the Foreign Relations of the United States — or the FRUS, as insiders call it — and lawmakers rely on it daily. It is available to the public in major libraries and online. The volume began in 1861, when Congress demanded a full account of Lincoln’s foreign policy during the Civil War. More than 450 volumes have been printed since. Later accusations that the documentation was partisan or incomplete were addressed with a congressional statute requiring the setup of an advisory committee of diverse historians. Without proper oversight, “a great many of the important facts of recent history still remain secret long after security requirements have expired,” Sen. Margaret Chase Smith (R-Maine) wrote in a June 1953 editorial in the Rutland Daily Herald, pointing to huge gaps in the historical records from the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration during the early 1930s..”
