A weekly collection of links lovingly curated by Colin Wright.
Why Have Scientists Stopped Taking Risks?
“Experts disagree on what has been holding science back. A common explanation is that potential discoveries are fewer and harder to find, absolving scientists, and institutions, from responsibility. In reality, similar complaints have been made in nearly every era, for example by late 19th-century physicists on the brink of discovering relativity. And such explanations can be self-fulfilling: it’s harder to get funding for ambitious exploratory work deemed infeasible by your peers.”
The Art of the Shadow: How Painters Have Gotten It Wrong for Centuries
“Painters have long struggled with the difficulties of depicting shadows, so much so that shadows — after a brief, spectacular showcase in ancient Roman paintings and mosaics — are almost absent from pictorial art up to the Renaissance and then are hardly present outside traditional Western art.”
Battle for Harlem
“The white mafia had storefronts up and down 7th Avenue for 30 blocks, many of them used to front a Harlem lottery operation that competed with the local Black-run lottery. The mob had discovered that the small bets made by the neighborhood’s working class Black residents could add up to big money—a fact known to local king and queenpins for decades. The neighborhood’s illegal gambling enterprises, which once operated in harmony, had more recently turned on each other, and with the arrival of organized crime as a new threat, Harlem was embroiled in an all-out power struggle. Black kingpins and white mobsters, who were fronted by a bootlegger named Dutch Schulz, moved with heavy muscle, adding violence to the scramble for lucrative territory and control over the streets of Harlem. Stephanie St. Clair abhorred what was happening to her neighborhood and did not welcome the intrusion. With equal zealousness, she hated the thought of giving up her throne.”
How To Appreciate Buildings
“The observation that ‘we shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us’, attributed to Winston Churchill, may be threadbare but it is nevertheless profoundly true. The buildings we inhabit help to make us who we are. Yet, in the run of our everyday experiences, it’s easy to become desensitised to their influences. Buildings can seem at times like little more than the containers of human experience, but they are so much more than that. Architecture can function as a vessel of emotion and thought. It can influence the way you feel about yourself and others. As any great art can change who you are, so can a building. It is the art that you live, work and play inside. If you are willing to spend the time to curiously explore buildings both from the inside and the outside, you will be rewarded with a greater sense of the power of place and, with mastery, a more refined ability to use your settings to control your own experience.”
The Man Who Went to War With Canada
“Then you get to the northeast corner. Depending on whom you ask, Machias Seal Island is either off the coast of Maine or of Grand Manan. It’s also either American or Canadian. It is the only place with this particular unsettled identity that you can actually stand on top of. Although the ownership of some stretches of water is still contested, this island—and neighboring North Rock, which is even smaller and barer—are the last crumbs of their land the two countries don’t agree on.”
Unplugging Asthmatic Airways
“For Azeke and more than 260 million other people with asthma worldwide, such attacks are a constant threat. Cold air, allergens and other triggers cause inflammation in their lungs, narrowing the air passages and increasing mucus production. Often, plugs of mucus block smaller airways completely, and this obstruction is a major cause of the nearly half-million deaths caused by asthma each year.”
Awash In Grief
“When someone has a chronic illness, it’s likely we will have taken time to prepare ourselves for the possibility of losing them. However COVID-19 deaths are often sudden and unexpected, giving us little time to mentally prepare. “It seems so unthinkable when it’s sudden,” said Dr. Shear. “Most of us don’t walk around the world thinking of possible ways that our loved ones are going to die.” When someone dies alone, as was the case for so many Americans quarantined in hospital rooms, we can feel like we’ve let them down.”
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