Museum sunlight: Cold River

 “If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.”

— Loren Eiseley

National Library: Cold river : the cold truth of freedom

“Those who love peace must learn to organize as effectively as those who love war.”

~ Martin Luther King Jr.

From Noah’s flood to Shakespeare’s storms, what literature reveals about our changing relationship with the weather

46 Years ago it was floods everywhere - Slovaks cross border into Austria in inflatable boats and wade through river after low water stops ferry

Fresh v Čerstvy - Foreigners learn what really makes Slovak so difficult (in a fun way) Fresh bread can be "old" in Polish

How to Give a Eulogy

Tom Chiarella shares his rules for giving a eulogy.

It may hurt to write it. And reading it? For some, that’s the worst part. The world might spin a little, and everything familiar to you might fade for a few minutes. But remember, remind yourself as you stand there, you are the lucky one.

And that’s not because you aren’t dead. You were selected. You get to stand, face the group, the family, the world, and add it up. You’re being asked to do something at the very moment when nothing can be done. You get the last word in the attempt to define the outlines of a life. I don’t care what you say, bub: That is a gift.

This rule surprised me:

You must make them laugh. Laughs are a pivot point in a funeral. They are your responsibility. The best laughs come by forcing people not to idealize the dead. In order to do this, you have to be willing to tell a story, at the closing of which you draw conclusions that no one expects.

 Literature has long portrayed messed-up families. As poet Philip Larkin famously wrote, “They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do.”

Who are the worst fathers in literature?

Who are the worst mothers in literature?

Ocean Photographer of the Year 2026 finalists include tiny seahorses and cooperating orcas

Jayne

 Kennedy

Jason Arday
Museum sunlight
Steven Shapin
When identity replaces argument
Sheila Heti
What sells books
Cult of Thomas Bernhard
Uninformed attack on literary studies
Failure qua failure
Chekhov and Tolstoy
Literary quote quiz
Remembering Gordon Wood
Hachette unionization
Historians as pundits
Enjoying John Ashbery
Amish language
Max Planck, retracted?
Rebecca Tuvel
Frederick Wiseman
Carlo Ginzburg, R.I.P.
Academic McCarthyism?
Summer reading
John Basinger, R.I.P.
George Saunders
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Gordon S. Wood, R.I.P.
On William Gass
AI's literary style
Books and AI
James Buchanan
Bad college teaching
Kerouac and mindfulness
Franklin Pierce
Butcher books
George Scialabba
Against "learning-management systems"
Laura B. McGrath
End of the scholarly article?
Story of spectacles
Tiger moms
Climbing Everest
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Literary middlemen
Return of little magazines
Daniyal Mueenuddin
Loving poets
Identitarian disqualification
"Infinite Jest" turns 30
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Among the Antigones
Serpell on Toni Morrison
Whither American Studies?
Drawing 'Wuthering Heights'
'Show, don't tell'?
Patrick Radden Keefe
On Shostakovich
Mispronouncing "Thoreau"
Starving for serendipity
Inbreeding Neanderthals
Sheep dreams
Literary LLMs
"Unmasking" Ferrante
Wrong movie titles
NIH collapse
Glenn Lowry
'Dean's List'
Ann Godoff
Anti-liberal historians
Animal longevity
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Mystery of migraines
Namwali Serpell
Twilight self
Lords of the ring
Jeffrey Epstein’s reading list
Rebranding “Wuthering Heights”
Jeffrey Epstein, litterateur
Bezos's WaPo
Ron Charles
Georges Borchardt, R.I.P.
Best scholarly books
Religion of beauty
A brief and unsatisfying novel
DeLillo's hockey fiction
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Buckley, proto-influencer
The spy and the chocolatier
Failed resolutions
Art-world giants
Books of 2026
Resolution reading
Hockey romance
Biggest books
Loury on Schelling
Counterproductive academic politics
Moorish castles
Crick and Watson
'Pride and Prejudice'

26 charts of Australia in trouble.

 Tiny forests popping up across Sydney as part of effort to restore urban tree canopy

26 charts of Australia in trouble.

Forty interesting facts about Australia

by  Tyler Cowen 

Australia was the richest country on earth, per capita, for decades. After the 1850s gold rush, up until the 1890s depression, Australia had the highest per capita income in the world. In 1850, probably only the United Kingdom and the Netherlands sat above Australia, by about 20 per cent, with the United States 9 per cent below. After the gold rushes Australia passed both, and from 1860 to 1890 the gap over the United States ran at 25 or 30 per cent.

And:

A cow cost as much as £84 in 1796, about several years’ wages for an English labourer. Only government, or its military/civil officers, owned cattle and horses in 1796, which were extraordinarily hard to import in the first decade, having to survive the long distance from South Africa or India. In England, an ordinary cow would have cost around £10.

And:

John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor seriously discussed running off to Australia. Mill was an active supporter of the movement that founded South Australia, joining the South Australian Association. Harriet’s younger brother, Arthur Hardy, migrated to South Australia and became a pastoralist and politician there. Liberals hoped that South Australia would become a progressive leader in political and social equality. Indeed, South Australia became the first self-governing jurisdiction in the world to allow women to vote and stand for parliament, in 1895.

And:

Australia’s 1890s economic depression was worse than the 1930s Great Depression. Real GDP per capita fell by around 20 per cent over the 1890s, compared with a fall of only about 10 per cent over the 1930s. Unlike America, Australia’s banking system largely remained intact during the 1930s. In part, that is because Australian banks remembered the catastrophic banking collapse of the 1890s, fuelled by huge credit growth and lax standards, particularly in Victoria. Of the 64 deposit-taking institutions in Australia in 1891, 54 were closed by 1893. A severe drought made economic recover even more difficult.

All forty are interesting, by Andrew Kemp on his very good Australia Substack.

 

Why there is a lot to learn from the Italian grandmother lifestyle

Lately, the internet has become obsessed with ‘nonnamaxxing’. My Italian grandmother just called it life

As an Italian living abroad, I can understand the recent internet obsession with Italian grandmas. The viral “nonnamaxxing” trend touts slow living as the secret to longevity and dough-rolling nonnas have proved a hit on the Pasta Grannies YouTube channel. Recently, the idea of the sciura, a well-to-do Milanese older lady, has also gained traction among luxury brands, while the wildly popular @sciuraglam Instagram account features glamorous dames having the time of their lives.

Nonne definitely know how to live well. In Milan, sciureknow how to dress well too. My own grandma, an original sciura, definitely knew both.

Recently, I thought of what she would say about my comfort-first wardrobe. She’d probably wonder where my generation’s taste for dressing down comes from, given her entire life was spent dressing up — herself, her daughters and her grandchildren. 

She had an ingrained sense of style best described as Milanese refinement with a twist: a mixture of quality garments and branded statement pieces, such as her ubiquitous Louis Vuitton bags and Hermès foulards, spiced up by a calculated flamboyant touch, or a leopard-print silk shirt and omnipresent brillocchi, chunky gold jewellery encrusted with gems. I remember her platinum-gold bob, blow-dried once weekly and seemingly unmovable, her python-skinned heels, and the huge fur coats she wore in winter. Dressed to the nines even to pick my sister and myself up from school, her clothing signalled her material comfort without being tacky.

But her carefully studied image was as far as possible from her origins: she was the first of four children of a poor family living on Milan’s outskirts. Her mum was a seamstress who struggled to support the family after her communist dad lost his factory job in fascist-ruled Italy.

Born in 1934, she was evacuated to nearby Brianza 10 years later to live in a convent with her younger siblings and was there when Allied forces raided the city. They were so hungry that when they found toothpaste in packages from Allied supply drops, they slathered it on toast and ate it — with predictable bellyaching results.

After the war she started working as a secretary in an architectural firm. There was a whole country to rebuild and money from the Marshall Plan to do it. Milan in the 1950s must have looked like endless possibilities; my grandmother was ready to seize them.

One night, she decided she wanted to go to the firm’s ball, but she had nothing to wear. Her mum refused to help her — the firm is where she had met my grandpa, a courtship initially opposed by my great-grandparents because he was 17 years older than her.

But Grandma was undeterred: she bought some dark green shantung silk with her savings, made herself a dress with a full, round skirt, switched her wooden clogs for her Sunday best and took the tram to the city. She was 18. Her strong-mindedness and independence were, for a woman of that day and age, something to behold. Not for nothing did we use to call her “General”.

In the 1950s, my grandpa and his siblings patented a type of window to ensure ventilation in industrial settings, which proved to be a good business. My grandma could now sew everything she wanted. In her newfound comfort as a housewife, she stopped working but kept her Singer sewing machine singing.

Her wardrobe was inspired by a desire to look like a million dollars with limited means and emulated movie stars Monica Vitti and Sophia Loren, whose voluminous hair and distinctively 1960s silhouettes she wore.

But her creativity didn’t stop at copying clothes (which she often did, including a beautiful black silk dress modelled on Chanel that I still wear on special occasions). She could make anything from a sketch or a simple request. She would make me dresses to order, often with short deadlines (“But Grandma! I need it for this weekend!”), until at some point she said, “Enough, you need to learn how to do your own.” She sat me at the Singer in her marble-top kitchen and gave me the three commandments: there’s no way back from cutting; hand-stitch everything first; and better loose than tight, you can always tuck it in.

I have never mastered the art, but one time she helped me make a Twiggy-inspired A-line dress in blue velvet with a very short hemline. I loved that dress so much I cried when I could no longer fit into it.

But most of my memories with her are in plain home clothes and an apron, often busy making gnocchi or rabbit, two of my favourite dishes. During the many summer months we spent at her countryside home, she dropped the classy Milanese act, donned coloured aprons and open-toe sandals, and taught us country girl games, making dolls out of poppy blossoms, weaving cane leaves to make a tent, or “painting” our nails red with geranium petals. She could be the typical Italian nonna dispensing wisdom and carbohydrates, as well as the elegant city-dwelling sciura. Despite being widowed quite young, nothing was beyond her skills and confidence — well, except for driving, which she refused to do, despite having a licence.

Proponents of “nonnamaxxing” say that adopting the lifestyle habits of Italian grandmothers will help improve your health and mental wellbeing. But what about dressing like one? To channel my inner Nonna, who died over a decade ago, I have kept a sleeveless number she made in a floral Sixties print, daring colours and mother-of-pearl buttons running up the tight neckline. To me, it is quintessentially her, reflecting the simple elegance and joyful courage with which she stitched her life together

Arrival of Vinted a ‘gamechanger’ for shopping secondhand in Australia

"Every time you open a book and read, a tree smiles, knowing there's life after death."

Arrival of Vinted a ‘gamechanger’ for shopping secondhand in Australia

Rome vs. Japan: Two Civilizations, Two Philosophies of Architectural Permanence Common Edge

1. Mike Jay, Wireheads: An Unnatural History of Technology in the Brain.  Much of this story is told through the lens of the accompanying science fiction and non-neuro trends in other parts of science.  An excellent book, substantive on every page, and it will make you want to read some of the works he cites.

2. Vasily Grossman, From the Front Line, Stalingrad-Treblinka-Berlin 1941-1945.  Self-recommending, the best third of this volume is just stunningly good.  You do not have to read the whole thing, as there is some degree of repetition.

3. Forough Farrokhzad, Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season.  She died in a car crash in 1967 at the age of thirty-three, but it turns out she was an amazing poet.  I usually do not enjoy poetry in translation, but this is so fiery and full of passion that I am happy to recommend it.  Surely in the original Farsi it is better (and quite different?) yet.

4. André Breton, Nadja.  It is short, and fun enough to read.  But one learns most books from the past are not masterpieces, and that surrealism as a movement — most of all in painting — was more important than the literary outputs of surrealism.  Nadja, to me, sounds like a drag.  Which is fine.  But.  What does Breton really think he is immortalizing here?  At the end he writes “Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or not at all.”  I do appreciate Breton for his understanding of Mexico, and for his cultivation of Haitian art.

5. Emma Southon, Servus: How Slavery Made the Roman Empire.  A very good and aggressively readable book about how terrible slavery was in the Roman Empire.  A useful corrective to other sources as well.  While my general view is that interpretative disputes over antiquity are difficult to resolve, I find her interpretations more intuitive and more convincing than the other side of the debate.