London Pedestrian Routemap
Because it has just been too long since I posted anything about Harry Beck's iconic London">http://www.clarksbury.com/cdl/maps/tube38.jpg">London Tube Map and I gets all itchy when that happens.
Wes Phillips
How We Learned to Stop Having Fun
Is depression an epidemic? Barbara Ehrenreich says that the way that depression seemed to sweep across Western Europe in the 17th Century looks like one, but is probably the result of the modern age's celebration of individuality. An increased sense of personal autonomy was accompanied by the loss of communal rituals and festivities that emphasized belonging to communities.
There's an Upside to Color Blindness?
Researcher Amanda Melin posits that color blindness might be an advantageous adaptation for capuchins hunting camouflaged insects. For us humans? Not so much—"selection pressure for maintaining color vision could have relaxed because it wasn’t a big advantage in the habitat or types of hunting used at the time."
Alan Moore on Pornography
Speaking of having fun . . . .
Oh, Mr. President!
Unconventional portraits of US presidents, the works in Mr. President "run the gamut from irreverent humor to deeply felt homage."
Red State Blues
Michael Ventura gets off the main roads and reports on the state of the union. The kids are leaving.
Confessions of a Car Salesman
Chandler Phillips thought he was applying to Edmunds.com for a job writing an advice column on buying and leasing cars. The editors had a better idea. They asked him to go undercover and work as a salesman at two lots: a high-pressure import dealership on the "auto mile" and a no-haggle American showroom.
The Archeology of Table Manners
Kate Colquhoun reviews Martin Jones's Feast: Why Humans Share Food. At first I thought the article's title was absurdly inflated, but I was convinced by the time Colquhoun wrote: "To mangle Brillat-Savarin, he dissects not just what early humans ate, but how they ate, in order to draw conclusions about who they were. In the process, he proves once again that food and the ways we have chosen to process and proffer it can be more revealing than any other historical or prehistoric artefact."
The Psychology of Baseball
Don't let the April 1 dateline throw you. It was also opening day, not just a holiday for the world's fools.
A Narrative History of the Light Bulb
"While in residence at the Baltimore Museum of Industry during the last two years, Catherine Wagner was given access to their 50,000+ collection of historic light bulbs, one of the premier collections of vintage and antique light bulbs in the United States, with lights dating from the early 19th century. The resulting series of photographs titled A Narrative History of the Light Bulb embodies both sculptural installation and photography. Wagner creates arrangements of bulbs that she then photographs with an 8 by 10 view camera in order to record the glass enclosures and the delicate filaments in stunning detail. Wagner’s work has long been noted for its investigation of the dissemination of knowledge and the construction of culture and these new works follow in her trajectory of providing access to the close scrutiny of scientific objects."