Humanity faces few larger questions than what, exactly, to do about climate change — and, in a sense larger still, what climate change even means. We’ve all heard a variety of different future scenarios laid out, each of them based on different data. But data can only make so much of an impact unless translated into a form with which the imagination can readily engage: a visual form, for instance, and few visual forms come more tried and true than the map.
And so “leading global strategist, world traveler, and best-selling author” Parag Khanna has created the map you see above (view in a larger format here), which shows us the state of our world when it gets just four degrees celsius warmer. “Micronesia is gone – sunk beneath the waves,” writes Big Think’s Frank Jacobs in an examination of Khanna’s map. “Pakistan and South India have been abandoned. And Europe is slowly turning into a desert.”
But “there is also good news: Western Antarctica is no longer icy and uninhabitable. Smart cities thrive in newly green and pleasant lands. And Northern Canada, Scandinavia, and Siberia produce bountiful harvests to feed the hundreds of millions of climate refugees who now call those regions home.”
Not quite as apocalyptic a climate-change vision as some, to be sure, but it still offers plenty of considerations to trouble us. Lands in light green, according to the map’s color scheme, will remain or turn into “food-growing zones” and “compact high-rise cities.” Yellow indicates “uninhabitable desert,” brown areas “uninhabitable due to floods, drought, or extreme weather.” In dark green appear lands with “potential for reforestation,” and in red those places that rising sea levels have rendered utterly lost.
Those last include the edges of many countries in Asia (and all of Polynesia), as well as the area where the southeast of the United States meets the northeast of Mexico and the north and south coasts of South America. But if you’ve ever wanted to live in Antarctica, you won’t have to move into a research base: within a couple of decades, according to Khanna’s data, that most mysterious continent could become unrecognizable and “densely populated with high-rise cities,” presumably with their own hipster quarters. But where best to grow the ingredients for its avocado toast?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
A crime was committed during a presidential campaign. Then came a cover up and other skullduggery. Finally, there was a resignation. Nope, we’re not talking about the trajectory of the Mueller investigation. We’re talking about Watergate–the subject of Slow Burn, a new, eight-episode podcast miniseries from Slate.
Available on iTunes, the web, and other podcast players, Slow Burnzeroes in on the questions: “What did it feel like to live through the scandal that brought down a president? What was that strange, wild ride like?” Below, you can read the introductory words from the podcast’s host, Leon Neyfakh. And then stream the first episode called “Martha,” as in Martha Mitchell, wife of John Mitchell, the Attorney General of the United States under President Nixon.
One day at the end of April 1973, Richard Nixon stood on a porch at Camp David and told John Ehrlichman he wanted to die. Nixon had summoned Ehrlichman, his long-serving domestic policy adviser, to tell him he was being fired from the White House.
Nixon had been dreading the conversation, but he knew it had to be done. The Department of Justice had recently informed the president that Ehrlichman could be facing criminal charges. Nixon felt the walls closing in.
Later, Nixon would tell the journalist David Frost how he gave his old friend the news: “I said, ‘You know, John, when I went to bed last night … I hoped—I almost prayed—I wouldn’t wake up this morning.’ ” According to Ehrlichman, the president then began to sob. It would be 15 months before he resigned from office.
So, that’s how Richard Nixon felt as the Watergate story went from a curious burglary to a national obsession. What was it like for everyone else? That’s the animating question behind my new eight-episode podcast series for Slate, Slow Burn.
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Before Pantone invented “a universal color language” or big box hardware stores arose with proprietary displays of colorfully-named paints—over a century before, in fact—a German mineralogist named Abraham Gottlob Werner invented a color system, as detailed and thorough a guide as an artist might need. But rather than only cater to the needs of painters, designers, and manufacturers, Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours also served the needs of scientists. “Charles Darwin even used the guide,” writes This is Colossal, “during his voyage to the Madeira, Canary, and Cape Verde islands on the H.M.S. Beagle.”
Werner’s is one of many such “color dictionaries” from the 19th century, “designed to give people around the world a common vocabulary,” writes Daniel Lewis at Smithsonian, “to describe the colors of everything from rocks and flowers to stars, birds, and postage stamps.” These guides appealed especially to naturalists.
Indeed, the book began—before Scottish painter Patrick Syme updated the system in English, with swatches of example colors—as a naturalist’s guide to the colors of the world, naming them according to Werner’s poetic fancy. “Without an image for reference,” the original text “provided immense handwritten detail describing where each specific shade could be found on an animal, plant, or mineral. Many of Werner’s unique color names still exist in common usage, though they’ve detached from his scheme ages ago.
Prussian Blue, for instance, which can be located “in the beauty spot of a mallard’s wing, on the stamina of a bluish-purple anemone, or in a piece of blue copper ore.” Other examples, notes Fast Company’s Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan, include “’Skimmed Milk White,’” or no. 7… found in ‘the white of the human eye’ or in opals,” and no. 67, or “’Wax Yellow’… found in the larvae of large Water Beetles or the greenish parts of a Nonpareil Apple.” It would have been Syme’s 1814 guide that Darwin consulted, as did scientists, naturalists, and artists for two centuries afterward, either as a taxonomic color reference or as an admirable historic artifact—a painstaking description of the colors of the world, or those encountered by two 18th and 19th century European observers, in an era before photographic reproduction created its own set of standards.
The book is now being republished in an affordable pocket-size edition by Smithsonian Books, who note that the Edinburgh flower painter Syme, in his illustrations of Werner’s nomenclature, “used the actual minerals described by Werner to create the color charts.” This degree of fidelity to the source extends to Syme’s use of tables to neatly organize Werner’s precise descriptions. Next to each color’s number, name, and swatch, are columns with its location on various animals, vegetables and minerals. “Orpiment Orange,” named after a mineral, though none is listed in its column, will be found, Werner tells us, on the “neck ruff of the golden pheasant” or “belly of the warty newt.” Should you have trouble tracking these down, surely you’ve got some “Indian cress” around?
While its references may not be those your typical industrial designer or graphic artist is likely to find helpful, Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours will still find a treasured place in the collections of designers and visual artists of all kinds, as well as historians, writers, poets, and the scientific inheritors of 19th century naturalism, as a “charming artifact from the golden age of natural history and global exploration.” Flip through a scanned version of the 1821 second edition just above, including Werner’s introduction and careful lists of color properties, or read it in a larger format at the Internet Archive. The new edition is now available for purchase here.
Be not inhospitable to strangers, lest they be angels in disguise.
More than a few visitors to Paris’ fabled Shakespeare & Company bookshop assume that the quote they see painted over an archway is attributable to Yeats or Shakespeare.
In fact, its author was George Whitman, the store’s late owner, a grand “hobo adventurer” in his 20s who made such an impression that he spent the rest of his life welcoming travelers and encouraging young writers, who flocked to the shop. A great many became Tumbleweeds, the nickname given to those who traded a few hours of volunteer work and a pledge to read a book a day in return for spartan accommodation in the store itself.
In light of this generosity, Whitman’s 1960 letter to Anne Frank (1929–1945) is all the more moving.
One wonders what inspired him to write it. It’s a not an uncommon impulse, but usually the authors are students close to the same age as Anne was at the time of her death.
Perhaps it was an interaction with a Tumbleweed.
He refrained from mentioning his own service in World War II, possibly because he was posted to a remote weather station in Greenland. Unlike other American veterans, he hadn’t witnessed with his own eyes the sort of hell she endured. If he had, he might not have been able to address her with such initial lightness of tone.
One can’t help but think how delighted the rambunctious young teen would have been by his sense of humor, his descriptions of his bohemian booklovers’ paradise—then called Le Mistral—and references to his dog, François Villon, and cat, Kitty, named in honor of Anne’s pet name for her diary.
His profound observations on the impermanence of life and the politics of war continue to resonate deeply with those who read the letter as its intended recipients’ proxies:
Le Mistral
37 rue de la Bûcherie
Dear Anne Frank,
If I sent this letter to the post office it would no longer reach you because you have been blotted out from the universe. So I am writing an open letter to those who have read your diary and found a little sister they have never seen who will never entirely disappear from earth as long as we who are living remember her.
You wanted to come to Paris for a year to study the history of art and if you had, perhaps you might have wandered down the quai Notre-Dame and discovered a little bookstore beside the garden of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre. You know enough French to read the notice on the door—Chien aimable, Priere d’entrer. The dog is not really a dog at all but a poet called Francois Villon who has returned to the city he loved after many years of exile. He is sitting by the fire next to a kitten with a very unusual name. You will be pleased to know she is called Kitty after the imaginary friend to whom you wrote the letters in your journal.
Here in our bookstore it is like a family where your Chinese sisters and your brothers from all lands sit in the reading rooms and meet the Parisians or have tea with the writers from abroad who are invited to live in our Guest House.
Remember how you worried about your inconsistencies, about your two selves—the gay flirtatious superficial Anne that hid the quiet serene Anne who tried to love and understand the world. We all of us have dual natures. We all wish for peace, yet in the name of self-defense we are working toward self-obliteration. We have built armaments more powerful than the total of all those used in all the wars in history. And if the militarists who dislike negotiating the minor differences that separate nations are not under the wise civilian authority they have the power to write man’s testament on a dead planet where radioactive cities are surrounded by jungles of dying plants and poisonous weeds.
Since a nuclear could destroy half the world’s population as well as the material basis of civilization, the Soviet General Nikolai Talensky concludes that war is no longer conceivable for the solution of political differences.
A young girl’s dreams recorded in her diary from her thirteenth to her fifteenth birthday means more to us today than the labors of millions of soldiers and thousands of factories striving for a thousand-year Reich that lasted hardly more than ten years. The journal you hid so that no one would read it was left on the floor when the German police took you to the concentration camp and has now been read by millions of people in 32 languages. When most people die they disappear without a trace, their thoughts forgotten, their aspirations unknown, but you have simply left your own family and become part of the family of man.
What do you want to do with your life? It’s a good question to ask any time. But particularly as you watch the very short film, “In The Fall,” by the inimitable Steve Cutts.
Enjoy. Reflect. Maybe make a change for the better.
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Everyone should learn to write well, I used to tell students in Composition classes, and I believed it. To write well, in a certain sense, is to become a better thinker. But writing differs from writing, perhaps, in the same way that walking the dog differs from hiking the Appalachian trail. There are levels of difficulty. How badly do you need to say something that no one else can—or wants to—say? How badly do you need to push this thing you’ve said into the world?
These are separate questions. Some writers really do write for themselves, some write for money, though they might also write for free. Some write as a means to other ends, and some require, at all times, an audience. It may be a sexual compulsion or an animal reflex or the only way to get one’s mind right. Or some combination of the above. As a Jesuit scholar I once knew would say, “I’ve never met a motive that wasn’t mixed.” Given the difficulty of discerning why anyone does anything, there could be as many mixed motives as there are writers.
That said, I tend to think that every writer who reads George Orwell’s essay “Why I Write” sees themselves in some part of his description of his early life. “I was somewhat lonely,” he tells us, “and I soon developed disagreeable mannerisms which made me unpopular throughout my schooldays. I had the lonely child’s habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued.”
Maybe everyone has such feelings, but again it is a question of degree. Given Orwell’s keen understanding of the writer’s mind from the inside out, and his diligent pursuit of his work through the most trying times, we might be inclined to give him a hearing when he claims, “there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose.” Orwell allows that these motives will be mixed, existing “in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living.”
But no one whom we might call a writer, Orwell suggests, writes solely for utility or money. The rewards are too peculiarly psychological, as are the pains. And the pleasures too otherworldly and practically useless. Orwell begins with one of those psychological compensations, fame, then proceeds to pleasure, then to duty to posterity and, finally, to persuasion; the four reasons, he says:
(i) Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen — in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all — and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money.
(ii) Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. The aesthetic motive is very feeble in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or writer of textbooks will have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for non-utilitarian reasons; or he may feel strongly about typography, width of margins, etc. Above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic considerations.
(iii) Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.
(iv) Political purpose. — Using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.
Surely, someone will suggest others, but it may be that other reasons would still fall into these categories. Neither are these motives consonant, “they must war with one another,” Orwell writes, and readers tend to egg the conflict on, declaring historical memoirs as products of pure egotism or turning their noses up at overly “political” novels.
Surprisingly, Orwell reveals that he might have done the same, had not circumstances forced his hand. “In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties,” he says. But who lives in a peaceful age? In any case, we might wonder if he is being completely honest. “What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice.”
Orwell admits that his task “is not easy,” and he offers unsparing examples of times when his writing has moved too far toward one end of the spectrum on which he situates himself. What is instructive about his framework for understanding his motivations, however, is that he has the tools to self-correct. Such self-knowledge can serve anyone in good stead. For the writer, who is compelled to reveal themselves over and over, it may be essential.
It takes no small amount of inquiry, from no few angles, to truly understand a form of art. This goes even more so for forms of art with which most of us in the 21st century have little direct experience. Take, for example, the illuminated manuscript: its history stretches back to the fifth century and it has arguably shaped all the forms of visual-textual storytelling we enjoy today, yet surely not one of a million of us understands how the artisans that made them did it.
The Public Domain Review did their bit to correct this when they posted the illuminated sketchbook of Stephan Schriber, a series of pages dating from 1494 in which “ideas and layouts for illuminated manuscripts were tried out and skills developed” by the author, a monk in the southwest of Germany. “The monk-artist produced this sketchbook at the tail end of the 1,000-year age of illuminated manuscripts,” write’s Slate’s Rebecca Onion, “a type of book production that was to die out as the Renaissance moved forward and the printing press took over.”
As printed books began to displace illuminated manuscripts, the production of the latter went commercial, no longer produced only by the hands of individual monks. But some of those monks, like Schriber, kept up their dedication to the craft: “These pages show an artist trying out animal motifs, practicing curlicued embellishments, and drafting beautiful presentations of the capital letters that would begin a section, page, or paragraph.”
BibliOdyssey points out that the book, “dedicated to Count Eberhard (Eberhard the bearded, later first Duke) of Württemberg,” appears to be “a manual of templates and/or a practice book containing partially completed sketches, painted and calligraphy initals, stylised floral decorative motifs, plant foliage tendrils, fantastic beast border drolleries” — yes, a real term from the field of illuminated manuscripts — “together with some gold and silver illumination work.”
You can browse more images from Schriber’s sketchbook at this Flickr account, or you can have a look at each and every page at the Munich DigitiZation Center. The images repay close study not just for their own beauty, but for what their seemingly deliberate incompleteness reveals about how a master of manuscript illuminations would go about composing their art. Even the creation of a form whose heyday passed more than half a millennium ago has something to teach us today.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Photographer Nan Goldin’s celebrated series The Ballad of Sexual Dependency would likely have sent portraitist Julia Margaret Cameron reeling for her smelling salts, but the century that divides these two photographers’ active periods is less of a barrier than one might assume.
As Goldin notes in the above episode of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s online series, The Artist Project, both made a habit of photographing people with whom they were intimately acquainted. (Cameron’s subjects included Virginia Woolf’s mother and Alice Liddell, the inspiration for Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.)
The trust between artist and subject is evident in both of their work.
And both were roundly criticized for their lack of technical prowess, though that didn’t stop either of them from pursuing their visions, in focus or not.
John Baldessari, who chafes at the “Conceptualist” label, has been a fan of Social Realist/Abstract Expressionist Philip Guston since high school, when he would tear images of early works from his parents’ Life magazines.
His admiration for Gustin’s nightmarish Stationary Figure reveals a major difference in attitude from museum goers sneering that their kids could have painted such a work. Baldessari sees both the big picture—the idea of death as a sort of cosmic joke—and the sophisticated brushwork.
Cartoonist Roz Chast chose to focus on Italian Renaissance painting in her episode, savoring those teeming canvases’ creators’ imperfect command of perspective and three dimensionality.
The maximalist approach helps her believe that what she’s looking at is “real,” even as she grants herself the freedom to interpret the narrative in the manner she finds most amusing, playfully suggesting that a UFO is responsible for The Conversion of Saint Paul.
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