A Map of How the Word “Tea” Spread Across the World

in Food & Drink, History | November 8th, 2019

When I order a cup of tea in Korea, where I live, I ask for cha (차); when traveling in Japan, I ask for the honorific-affixed ocha (お茶). In Spanish-speaking places I order té, which I try to pronounce as distinctly as possible from the thé I order in French-speaking ones. And on my trips back to United States, where I’m from, I just ask for tea. Not that tea, despite its awe-inspiring venerability, has ever quite matched the popularity of coffee in America, but you can still find it most everywhere you go. And for decades now, no less an American corporate coffee juggernaut than Starbucks has labeled certain of its teas chai, which has popularized that alternative term but also created a degree of public confusion: what’s the difference, if any, between chai and tea?

Both words refer, ultimately, to the same beverage invented in China more than three millennia ago. Tea may now be drunk all over the world, but people in different places prefer different kinds: flavors vary from region to region within China, and Chinese teas taste different from, say, Indian teas. Starbucks presumably brands its Indian-style tea with the word chai because it sounds like the words used to refer to tea in India.

It also sounds like the words used to refer to tea in Farsi, Turkish, and even Russian, all of them similar to chay. But other countries’ words for tea sound different: the Maylay teh, the Finnish tee, the Dutch thee. “The words that sound like ‘cha’ spread across land, along the Silk Road,” writes Quartz’s Nikhil Sonnad. “The ‘tea’-like phrasings spread over water, by Dutch traders bringing the novel leaves back to Europe.”

“The term cha (茶) is ‘Sinitic,’ meaning it is common to many varieties of Chinese,” writes Sonnad. “It began in China and made its way through central Asia, eventually becoming ‘chay’ (چای) in Persian. That is no doubt due to the trade routes of the Silk Road, along which, according to a recent discovery, tea was traded over 2,000 years ago.” The te form “used in coastal-Chinese languages spread to Europe via the Dutch, who became the primary traders of tea between Europe and Asia in the 17th century, as explained in the World Atlas of Language Structures. The main Dutch ports in east Asia were in Fujian and Taiwan, both places where people used the te pronunciation. The Dutch East India Company’s expansive tea importation into Europe gave us the French thé, the German Tee, and the English tea.”

And we mustn’t leave out the Portuguese, who in the 1500s “travelled to the Far East hoping to gain a monopoly on the spice trade,” as Culture Trip’s Rachel Deason writes, but “decided to focus on exporting tea instead. The Portuguese called the drink cha, just like the people of southern China did,” and under that name shipped its leaves “down through Indonesia, under the southern tip of Africa, and back up to western Europe.” You can see the global spread of tea, tee, thé, chai, chay, cha, or whatever you call it in the map above, recently tweeted out by East Asia historian Nick Kapur. (You may remember the fantastical Japanese history of America he sent into circulation last year.) Study it carefully, and you’ll be able to order tea in the lands of both te and cha. But should you find yourself in Burma, it won’t help you: just remember that the word there is lakphak.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, 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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

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What to Wear to a Successful PhD Thesis Defense? A Skirt’s Worth of Academic Rejection Letters

in Creativity, Education, Fashion, Life, Science | November 8th, 2019

Some people are paralyzed by rejection.

Others, like Michigan State University’s Earth and Environmental Sciences PhD candidate, Caitlin Kirby, sport rejection like a mantle of honor… or more accurately, a pleated skirt falling to just below mid-thigh.

“Successfully defended my PhD dissertation today!” Kirby wrote in a Tweet that has since garnered over 25,000 likes. “In the spirit of acknowledging & normalizing failure in the process, I defended in a skirt made of rejection letters from the course of my PhD.”

The custom garment, which Kirby teamed with a dark blazer and red waistband, was organized in two tiers, with a tulle ruffle peeping out beneath.

MSU’s Career Services Network’s Director of Employer Relations, Karin Hanson, told the Lansing State Journal that rejection comes as a shock to many high achieving MSU students.

Kirby’s decision to upcycle 17 disappointing letters received over the course of her academic career was partially inspired by a Parks and Recreation episode in which the skirt of Leslie Knope’s wedding dress is a wearable collage of newspaper articles about the character, drawn from earlier episodes

More to the point, Kirby’s skirt is part of an ongoing campaign to acknowledge rejection as a necessary, if painful, part of academic growth.

The whole process of revisiting those old letters and making that skirt sort of reminded me that you have to apply to a lot of things to succeed. It seems counterintuitive to wear your rejections to your last test in your Ph.D, but we talked about our rejections every week and I wanted them to be a part of it.

And, as she later noted in a tweet:

Acceptances and rejections are often based on the traditional values of academia, which excludes POC by not valuing the approaches, research questions, and experiences that POC tend to bring to their work.

Kirby’s letters were culled from a variety of sources—scholarship applications, submissions to academic journals, and proposals for conference presentations. Unfortunately and We regret to inform you are recurrent motifs. About 8 letters were left on the cutting room floor.

But she is prepared to lower her hemline, when she starts applying for jobs, following a stint at the Research Institute for Urban and Regional Development in Dortmund, Germany, the result of a successful Fulbright application.

Follow Kirby’s example and turn your temporary setbacks into a power skirt, using the tutorial above.

via Boing Boing

T.S. Eliot, as Faber & Faber Editor, Rejects George Orwell’s “Trotskyite” Novel Animal Farm (1944)

Gertrude Stein Gets a Snarky Rejection Letter from Publisher (1912)

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Join her in NYC on Monday, December 9 when her monthly book-based variety show, Necromancers of the Public Domain, resurrects Dennison’s Christmas Book (1921). Follow her @AyunHalliday.

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The Benefits of Boredom: How to Stop Distracting Yourself and Get Creative Ideas Again

in Creativity, Neuroscience, Psychology | November 7th, 2019

Here in the 21st century, we have conquered boredom. Impressive though that achievement may be, it hasn’t come without cost: As with many other conditions we’ve managed to eliminate from our lives, boredom now looks to have been essential to full human existence. Has our reality of on-demand distractions, tailored ever more closely to our impulses and desires, robbed us of yet another form of everyday adversity that built up the character of previous generations? Perhaps, but more importantly, it may also have dried up our well of creativity. The frustration that descends on us when trying to come up with new ideas; the itch we feel, whenever we start doing something, to do something else; our inability to go more than a few minutes without looking at our phones: we can hardly assume these modern problems are unrelated.

“When you’re bored, you tend to daydream, and your mind wanders, and this is a very, very important part of the creative process,” says psychologist Sandi Mann in the animated BBC REEL video at the top of the post. “If you find that you’re stuck on a problem, or you’re really worried about something and can’t seem to find a way out, take some time out. Just be bored. Let your mind wander, and you might just find that a creative solution will pop into your head.”

But we’ve fallen into the habit of “swiping and scrolling our boredom away,” seeking “a dopamine hit from new and novel experiences” — most often digital ones — to assuage our fears of boredom. And the more such stimulation we get, the more we need, meaning that, “paradoxically, the way to deal with boredom is to allow more of it into our life.”

“Once you start daydreaming and allow your mind to really wander,” Mann says, “you start thinking a little bit beyond the conscious, a little bit into the subconscious, which allows sort of different connections to take place.” She says it in “How Boredom Can Lead to Your Most Brilliant Ideas,” a TED Talk by journalist Manoush Zomorodi. Like the public-radio podcaster she is, Zomorodi brings in interview clips from not just Mann but a range of experts on the subject of boredom and distraction, including neuroscientist Daniel Levitin, who warns that “every time you shift your attention from one thing to another, the brain has to engage a neurochemical switch that uses up nutrients in the brain to accomplish that.” And so the “multitasking” in which we once prided ourselves amounts to nothing more than “rapidly shifting from one thing to the next, depleting neural resources as you go.”

We’ve become like the experiment subjects, described in the Veritasium video above, who were asked to sit alone in an empty room for a few minutes with nothing in front of them but a button that they knew would shock them. In the end, 25 percent of the women and 60 percent of the men chose, unasked, to shock themselves, presumably out of a preference for painful stimulation over no stimulation at all. How much, we have to wonder, does that ultimately differ from the distractions we compulsively seek at every opportunity in the form of social media, games, and other addictive apps? And what do these increasingly frequent self-administered jolts do to our ability to identify promising avenues of thought and follow them all the way to their most fruitful conclusions? As the old saying goes, only the boring are bored. But if our technological lives keep going the way they’ve been going, soon only the bored will be interesting.

How Information Overload Robs Us of Our Creativity: What the Scientific Research Shows

Lynda Barry on How the Smartphone Is Endangering Three Ingredients of Creativity: Loneliness, Uncertainty & Boredom

David Lynch Explains How Meditation Boosts Our Creativity (Plus Free Resources to Help You Start Meditating)

How to Focus: Five Talks Reveal the Secrets of Concentration

Why Time Seems to Speed Up as We Get Older: What the Research Says

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, 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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

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The Digital Dada Library: Discover the Archive That Preserves the Original Publications of the Experimental Anti-Art Movement Online

in Art | November 7th, 2019

Critical theorists like Theodor Adorno may have overreached in claiming that all mass culture is mediocre, mechanized propaganda made to justify the status quo. But that doesn’t mean they were entirely wrong. Over and over we see even the most subversive art, literature, film, and music has a way of being tamed and Bowdlerized. Global mega-corporate industries don’t need to censor what they don’t like; they only need to buy it, rebrand it, or price it out of reach.

So what? Why do we need challenging, independent art when we have endless entertainment? Is the concept a nostalgic, elitist, Eurocentric idea? Artists have justified the need for art since antiquity, with poetic and logical arguments of every kind. But Dada artists of the early 20th century broke ranks, building their movement on the insight that no defense could possibly mean anything when it came to art’s purpose, especially in the face of the technocratic slaughter of World War I.

When the hyperrationalism of modernity led to mass death and destruction, the only humane response was to declare war on rationalization—to “destroy the hoaxes of reason,” as French artist Jean Arp put it. “For the disillusioned artists of the Dada movement,” the Museum of Modern Art explains, “the war merely confirmed the degradation of social structures that led to such violence: corrupt and nationalist politics, repressive social values, and unquestioning conformity of culture and thought.”

Dada took a combative stance against, for one thing, the insistence that art justify its existence to win establishment approval. “All activity is vain,” declared poet Tristan Tzara in his 1918 “Dada Manifesto,” including the “monetary system, pharmaceutical product, or a bare leg advertising the ardent sterile spring…. The beginnings of Dada were not the beginnings of art, but of disgust” with the ossified culture of the “nice, nice bourgeois,” who would preserve at any cost “the possibility of wallowing in cushions and good things to eat.”

“And so Dada,” wrote Tzara, “was born of a need for independence, of a distrust toward unity.” Such declarations aside, the movement was decidedly unified in its aims. “For us, art is not an end in itself,” poet Hugo Ball wrote. “It is an opportunity for the true perception and criticism of the times we live in.” This critique required new experimental techniques that deformed and repurposed the technologies of mass culture.

The undertaking would not have been possible without a Dada publishing wing that turned out scores of journals, magazines, books, leaflets, essays, manifestos, etc., written, designed, edited, illustrated, photographed, and controlled by the artists themselves. They might find no small amount of irony in the fact that their productions have received the ultimate institutional sanction: housed in “nice, nice bourgeois” museums, libraries, and universities around the world.

The University of Iowa’s International Dada Archive has amassed a considerable number of Dada publications and offers a wealth of high-quality scanned images of the originals on their site. “The first section” of their Digital Library “includes some of the major periodicals of the Dada movement from Zurich, Berlin, Paris, and elsewhere.” These are not always complete runs, though the library has included “reprints of issues for which we do not own originals” to make up for missing items in the collection.

The second section of the site “includes books by some of the participants in the Dada movement, as well as some of the more ephemeral Dada-era publications, such as exhibiton catalogs and broadsides.” You’ll find writings by all of the artists mentioned above, as well as other well-known names like Max Ernst, Paul Eluard, George Grosz, Man Ray, Francis Picabia, and more.

All of these publications are, of course, in their original European languages, though you can find translations of many documents online. The most influential Dada magazine in English, Alfred Stieglitz’s 291, will give monolingual readers a flavor of the larger scene. Published in New York between 1915 and 1916, the short-lived journal included many of the major European names. Its first issue covered experiments like “simultanism,” “sincerism,” and “idiotism,” and introduced visual poetry to American readers. Issue 5–6 featured on its cover one of the weird, nonsensical machines of Francis Picabia.

Dada splintered into other movements before its artists were forced out of Europe or hounded into obscurity by the Nazis. Their unified attempt to fragment and disrupt the dominance of mass culture was itself fragmented and disrupted by a horrific new war machine. But while their ideas may have been co-opted, their spirit may yet live on. Inspired by their work, perhaps a new generation will take up the Sisyphean task of making radical, critical, experimental art to subvert the homogenizing juggernaut of the culture industry.

Enter the University of Iowa’s Digital Dada Library here.

Hear the Experimental Music of the Dada Movement: Avant-Garde Sounds from a Century Ago

Download All 8 Issues of Dada, the Arts Journal That Publicized the Avant-Garde Movement a Century Ago (1917–21)

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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When White Supremacists Overthrew a Government (1898): The Hidden History of an American Coup

in History | November 7th, 2019

White supremacist ideology has found a home in both major political parties at different times in the country’s history. But it has not always been openly acknowledged, receding into coded language and whispers when out of political favor. In the decades after Reconstruction and after World War I, however, politicians shouted racist, xenophobic speeches through bullhorns, inciting thousands of lynchings across the country.

One incredibly bloody mass killing, the so-called Tulsa “Race Riot” of 1921—actually a massacre and decimation of a thriving business district—has come back into public consciousness after a fictionalized depiction on HBO’s Watchmen series. Twelve years earlier, another definitive event took place in Wilmington, North Carolina. If mentioned at all, it’s been glossed over quickly in textbooks and the town’s historical memory, but the Wilmington Massacre is part of a history of racial terrorism many celebrated openly, then sought to suppress, deny, and ignore when it became embarrassing.

Yale professor of history Glenda Gilmore calls the period a “50-year black hole of information.” Growing up in North Carolina herself, she says, “I had never heard the word ‘lynching’ until I was 21.” In fact, as the Vox video above notes, librarians in Wilmington refused even to release materials related to the massacre. This is odd considering its significance to American history as the only successful violent overthrow of an elected U.S. government on U.S. soil.

It was a coup (despite the way that word has been deliberately misused) involving no due process or constitutional checks and balances. The violence began on the morning of November 10, 1898, when the offices of The Daily Record were set on fire. By the day’s end, “as many as 60 people had been murdered, and the local government that was elected two days prior had been overthrown and replaced by white supremacists,” writes The Atlantic.

This was no spontaneous riot. The events had been planned and promoted by the most prominent leaders in the city and state, who gathered at the Thalian Hall opera house in Wilmington the previous month to hear a speech in which Democratic Congressman Alfred Waddell declared “We will never surrender to a ragged raffle of Negroes, even if we have to choke the Cape Fear River with carcasses.”

This kind of rhetoric was commonplace. White supremacist clubs around the State, goaded on by South Carolina senator Ben Tillman, resounded with talk of “shotgun politics” to oust elected Black Republicans. After Waddell’s Thalian Hall speech, he traveled to Goldsboro for a “White Supremacy Convention” attended by 8,000 people. There, Major William Guthrie promised, “Resist our march of progress and civilization and we will wipe you off the face of the earth.”

The convention was hailed in The Fayetteville Observer as “A White Man’s Day.” and Tillman’s exhortation “in behalf of the restoration of white rule” by violence was called “a great speech for democracy.” The massacre and overthrow of Wilmington’s government followed soon after. Historians were able to reconstruct the events after their suppression in part because they were so widely celebrated for decades afterward. “In the 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, they bragged about it,” says historian David S. Cecelski.

Along with a disturbing resurgence, we’ve also recently seen a public reckoning with the racial terror and tyranny of the late-19th and early 20th centuries, as the memory of lynching is enshrined in memorials and museums, and stories buried since the 50s are unearthed. This history has been also been used by some modern-day Republicans to grind political axes against modern-day Democrats, as though the major 1960s Civil Rights realignment never happened.

Shallow partisanship aside, the fact remains: what the Wilmington insurrectionists and their allies and inciters campaigned, burned, and killed for was a return to the oppressive rule of an elite white minority, against a multiracial democratic coalition that had united former slaves and poor white farmers in a fusion government representing working people in North Carolina and the thriving, majority Black population in Wilmington, its largest city at the time.

Learn more about the history of the Wilmington Massacre in the Vox video above and in the excellent collection Democracy Betrayed.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Martin Scorsese Explains the Difference Between Cinema and Movies

in Film | November 6th, 2019

Image by “Siebbi,” Wikimedia Commons

There is a battle raging on the internet, and you may count yourself lucky if you’ve heard nothing about it since it involves the usual unnecessary escalations and knee-jerk reactions: the battle of superhero movies versus the art form known as “cinema.” The first shot, one might say, was fired by Martin Scorsese, who has certainly earned the right to make pronouncements on the subject. Asked for his thoughts on the MCU (that’s Marvel Cinematic Universe for the uninitiated) during an interview with Empire magazine, Scorsese opined, “that’s not cinema. Honestly, the closest I can think of them, as well made as they are, with actors doing the best they can under the circumstances, is theme parks.”

This writer is of the opinion that one can enjoy film both as art and as pure spectacle, while recognizing clear differences between them. They share a medium, but they aim at and produce different effects. Comparing the experience of watching Avengers: Endgame or most any other Marvel film to riding a rollercoaster seems perfectly apposite to me. Still, comic film fans went wild online, lobbing all sorts of accusations at Scorsese and fellow directors who delivered even less charitable takes on the Marvel movie phenom. Twitter memes and jokes proliferated; Disney’s CEO weighed in with what must surely be a disinterested critical opinion.

Let’s look past distracting hot takes, marketing strategies, and generational warfare. Scorsese has eloquently clarified his position in a New York Times op-ed, and his arguments are worth our attention. For one thing, the director approaches the subject with humility, admitting his own biases. “The fact that [Marvel] films don’t themselves interest me is a matter of personal taste and temperament,” he writes. “I know that if I were younger, if I’d come of age at a later time, I might have been excited by these pictures and maybe even wanted to make one myself.”

He details his own sense of what cinema should be, one drawn principally from his influences: Bergman, Godard, Hitchcock (whose movies might also be called theme parks in a way, Scorsese grants, but rely more on characterization than grand set pieces and special effects). He also lists current favorites: Ari Aster, Spike Lee, Kathryn Bigelow, Paul Thomas Anderson. As an auteur himself, he has a clear bias in favor of other auteurs. Yet there’s more at stake than taste or what some have seen as elitism. “Why not just let superhero films and other franchise films be?” he asks. “The reason is simple. In many places around this country and around the world, franchise films are now your primary choice if you want to see something on the big screen.”

Superhero movies have dominated the market, edging out other kinds of films with other kinds of aspirations. The “financial dominance” of what Scorsese calls “worldwide audiovisual entertainment” is “being used to marginalize and even belittle the existence” of cinema—of smaller films that take creative risks and are not computer-generated products of market research and audience testing for maximum box-office consumption. Having grown up himself in the Hollywood studio system, Scorsese doesn’t dismiss film as a business, but he laments the loss of a “productive tension” between “the artists and the people who ran the business.” Without that tension, the industry becomes an efficient, but inhuman, machine.

It’s a problem, in other words, of a power imbalance in which studios—vertically integrated into mega-corporations like Disney—push profit over most other considerations. This severely limits the risks they’re willing to take, and it pushes independent and experimental filmmakers further into the margins, and out of theaters altogether, where their works were meant to be seen. Netflix and other streaming services may open up unique opportunities, but they diminish film by relegating it to television screens (and, worse, tablets and phones).

Scorsese’s argument is only partly an aesthetic one—he may object to Marvel movies on the grounds that they’re forgettable and predictable. But the primary concern he voices in his essay is a problem of proportion. The Marvel Cinematic Universe—like the villain in Avengers: Endgame (which Scorsese hasn’t seen)—threatens to take over and half-destroy the universe of cinema in all its variety of forms and expressions. It is largely succeeding. “For anyone who dreams of making movies or who is just starting out, the situation at this moment is brutal and inhospitable to art,” Scorsese writes. “And the act of simply writing those words fills me with terrible sadness.” Read his essay here.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Comic Sans Turns 25: Graphic Designer Vincent Connare Explains Why He Created the Most Hated Font in the World

in Design | November 6th, 2019

What we write reveals who we are, but so, and often more clearly, does how we write. And in an age when handwriting has given way to typing, how we write has much to do with which font we use. Many of us play it safe, rarely straying from the realm of twelve-point Times New Roman hypernormality, but even there “type is a voice; its very qualities and characteristics communicate to readers a meaning beyond mere syntax.” That observation comes from the Ban Comic Sans Manifesto, drawn up two decades ago by graphic designers Holly and David Combs as a strike against the font that, 25 years after its creation, remains a hate object of choice for the visually literate everywhere.

“You don’t like that your coworker used me on that note about stealing her yogurt from the break room fridge?” asks Comic Sans itself, ventriloquized in McSweeney’s by Mike Lacher. “You don’t like that I’m all over your sister-in-law’s blog? You don’t like that I’m on the sign for that new Thai place? You think I’m pedestrian and tacky?” Well, tough: “People love me. Why? Because I’m fun. I’m the life of the party. I bring levity to any situation. Need to soften the blow of a harsh message about restroom etiquette? SLAM. There I am. Need to spice up the directions to your graduation party? WHAM. There again. Need to convey your fun-loving, approachable nature on your business’ website? SMACK.”

In the Great Big Story video above, Comic Sans creator Vincent Connare tells his side of the story. While employed at Microsoft in the early 1990s, he saw a prototype version of Microsoft Bob, a kind of add-on to the Windows interface designed for maximum user friendliness. It featured onscreen animal characters that spoke in speech bubbles, but the words in those speech bubbles appeared in what was everyone’s default font. When it hit him that “dogs don’t talk in Times New Roman,” Connare, a graphic-novel fan, got to work on a typeface for the speech bubbles modeled on the lettering by John Costanza in The Dark Knight Returns and by Dave Gibbons in Watchmen.

Comic Sans didn’t make it into Microsoft Bob, it did make it into a somewhat more successful Microsoft product: Windows 95, which David Kadavy at Design for Hackers calls “the first operating system to really hit it big. Just as computers were starting to pop up in nearly every home in America, Windows 95 was finding itself installed on all of those computers, and with it, the font Comic Sans. So now, nearly every man, woman, child, and bake sale organizer find themselves armed with publishing power unlike civilization had ever seen; and few of them really had any design sense.” Then came the internet boom, which meant that “instead of flyers posted in break rooms, Comic Sans was showing up on websites, and even as the default font for many people’s emails. Now, any one person could write a message that could potentially be read by millions, in Comic Sans.”

What makes Comic Sans so reviled? Kadavy points to several reasons having to do with typographical aesthetics, including awkward weight distribution (“weight” being the thickness of its lines) and poor letterfit (meaning that its letters don’t, or can’t, sit well next to each other). But the problem most of us notice is that “Comic Sans isn’t used as intended”: A typeface meant only for speech bubbles in Microsoft Bob has somehow become one of the most popular in the world, appearing unsuitably in everything from Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert’s open letter on the departure of LeBron James to CERN’s announcement of evidence of the Higgs boson particle to, just last month, a letter from Donald Trump’s lawyer’s to the House Intelligence Committee.

Through it all, Connare himself — who has designed such relatively respectable typefaces as Trebuchet, and has famously only used Comic Sans once, in a complaint letter to his cable company — has kept his sense of humor, as evidenced by his talk entitled “Comic Sans Is the Best Font in the World.” Even the Combs’ movement has changed its name, if not without irony, into “Use Comic Sans.” Pieces marking the font’s 25th anniversary include “Hating Comic Sans Is Not a Personality” by The New York Times’ Emma Goldberg and “In Bad Taste or Not, I’ll Keep My Comic Sans” by The Washington Post’s Joseph Epstein (published, entirely and courageously, in Comic Sans). If you love the font, Connare often says, you don’t know much about typography, but if you hate it, “you should get another hobby.” Besides, the story of Comic Sans also contains an important life lesson: “You have to do things that aren’t beautiful sometimes.”

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, 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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

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The Difference Between the United Kingdom, Great Britain and England: A (Pre-Brexit) Video Explains

in History, Maps, Politics | November 6th, 2019

I once played in a New York pub band with an Englishman, a Northern Irishman, and a Scotsman. This is not the setup for a joke. (We weren’t that bad!) But I had questions. Were they all from different countries or different parts of one country called Britain, or Great Britain, or the grander-sounding United Kingdom?

British history could be a contentious subject in such company, and no wonder given that the violence of the Empire began at home, or with the neighboring people who were absorbed—sometimes, partly, but not always—against their will into a larger entity. So, what to call that territory of the crown which once claimed one fourth of the world as its own property?

CGP Grey, maker of the YouTube explainer above, aims to clear things up in five minutes, offering his own spin on British imperial history along the way. The United Kingdom is a “country of countries that contains inside it four coequal and sovereign nations,” England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. “You can call them all British,” says Grey, but “it’s generally not recommended as the four countries generally don’t like each other.”

Like it or not, however, they are all British citizens of “The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.” Still confused? Well, Britain and the United Kingdom name the same country. But “Great Britain” is a geographical term that includes Scotland, England, and Wales, but not Northern Ireland. As a “geographical rather than a political term,” Great Britain sounds silly when used to describe nationality.

But it gets a bit more complicated. All of the countries located within Great Britain have neighboring islands that are not part of Great Britain, such as the Hebrides, Shetland and Orkney Islands, and Isles of Anglesey and Wight. Ireland is a geographical term for the land mass encompassing two nations: Northern Ireland, which is part of Britain, or the United Kingdom, and the Republic of Ireland, which—as you know—is decidedly not.

All of these countries and “countries of countries” are part of the European Union, says Grey, at which point it becomes clear that the video, posted in 2011, did not anticipate any such thing as Brexit. Nonetheless, this information holds true for the moment, though that ugly saga is sure to reach some resolution eventually, at which point, who knows what new maps, independence referenda, and border wars will arise, or resurrect, on the British Isles.

Watch the Rise and Fall of the British Empire in an Animated Time-Lapse Map ( 519 A.D. to 2014 A.D.)

The History of Europe from 400 BC to the Present, Animated in 12 Minutes

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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A Map of How the Word “Tea” Spread Across the World

What to Wear to a Successful PhD Thesis Defense? A Skirt’s Worth of Academic Rejection Letters

The Benefits of Boredom: How to Stop Distracting Yourself and Get Creative Ideas Again

The Digital Dada Library: Discover the Archive That Preserves the Original Publications of the Experimental Anti-Art Movement Online

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