We know from stories of the Old West that newspapers of the time were more dedicated to sensationalism than facts. A good yarn sold papers, especially in areas for away from the place where the story occurred. But over time, journalism changed and "fact checker" became an occupation, although a grinding one usually relegated to women. Publications that wanted to build a reputation as reliable began to filter stories through fact checkers before publication, but it wasn't a popular innovation with everyone.
If writers were pitted against fact checkers, it was because the former resented a check on the idea of the lone genius whose words were unassailable. In the era of New Journalism, The New Yorker’s fact-checking arm came in for criticism from figures like Tom Wolfe, who saw in it a form of groupthink and regarded it as a cabal of women and middling editors all collaborating to henpeck and emasculate the prose of the Great Writer.
Only a year after acclaimed director John Huston gave us The Maltese Falcon, he was called up to serve in World War II. The army put him to work creating propaganda films, which he took seriously. Huston created three masterpieces, the last of which was Let There Be Light, an unscripted documentary that featured returning soldiers suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD. Previously referred to as battle fatigue or shell shock, the term PTSD didn't make it into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual until 1980. Huston's one-hour documentary followed World War II veterans undergoing treatment at Mason General Hospital on Long Island.
When the Army saw the finished product, higher powers pulled the plug on the movie, citing concerns for the soldiers’ privacy. In contradiction to this, the Army approved several film stills from Huston’s footage (which clearly show the soldiers’ faces) to be published in a 1945 article for Life magazine on the treatment of “battle-fatigue” for wounded soldiers. Why was a powerful film tackling the complexities of PTSD denied a release? The decision would help push back the awareness and progress for PTSD treatment by another four decades.
Photographer Lara Vychuzhanina of Yekaterinburg, Russia, imagined the dolls Barbie and Ken living in Russia during the final years of the Soviet Union in the 1980s. She set the dolls in a dismal apartment, which is an intricate recreation in miniature, down to the brand-name products in the kitchen.
Before the development of the printing press, book s were serious business. They were copied painstakingly by hand, one copy at a time, and the resulting work was worth a lot of money. Since these manuscripts were tempting to thieves, many of them included a curse upon any who would steal or abuse them. They might even rhyme.
Who folds a leafe downe ye divel toaste browne, Who makes marke or blotte ye divel roaste hot, Who stealeth thisse boke ye divel shall cooke.
Most people think of cats as fairly inscrutable. Cat owners learn to read body language, as the predators keep their faces still and let their emotions come out in their tails. While it's true that cats don't use facial expressions the way people do, there are subtle changes in a cat's face that can give away their feelings. However, few people can reliably read those facial expressions. A recent experiment in which 6329 people were shown close-up images of cats' faces without the rest of their body or environmental context clues, the average score was only 59%, revealing that people are not good at reading a cat's face.
So why do researchers think they have any expression at all? Roughly 13 percent of subjects scored well on the test, getting at least 15 of the 20 questions correct. Those that did well were generally people who had extensive experience with cats, like veterinarians. That led researchers to conclude that people can become more attuned to the subtle flickers of emotion that may pass over a cat’s face.
“They could be naturally brilliant, and that’s why they become veterinarians,” Georgia Mason, a behavioral biologist and the study’s senior author, told The Washington Post. “But they also have a lot of opportunity to learn, and they’ve got a motivation to learn, because they’re constantly deciding: Is this cat better? Do we need to change the treatment? Does this cat need to go home? Is this cat about to take a chunk out of my throat?”
Do you think you have what it takes to be a cat whisperer? You can take an online version of the test to see if you outscore the average participant.
Jessica Leigh Clark-Bojin (previously at Neatorama) takes the art of the pie to the next level. She unveiled her latest work at reddit. It's a raspberry Christmas pie featuring Baby Yoda! Check out the details that make it special: the edge is festooned with holly and candy cane shapes, but also has three Mandalorian helmets. The baby is drinking hot chocolate with marshmallows and a candy cane. His eyes are shiny thanks to a glaze of maple syrup. And look at his tiny Santa hat! You can enlarge the picture here. See more of Clark-Bojin's pies at her website and at Instagram.
Update: We now have an image of the pie before it was cut!
A little girl wakes up on a special day and wants her hair to look perfect. But she's just a kid, and her father knows nothing about hair styling (obviously someone else did his). You might think this is about black hair and about a father overcoming his incompetence, but it's much more than that. Hair Love was directed by Matthew A. Cherry, producer of BlacKkKlansman, Everett Downing Jr., animator in Up, and Bruce W. Smith, animator in The Princess and the Frog. -via Metafilter
In the late 19th and early 20th century, several countries were busy colonizing as much of Africa as they could. They ran into problems raising familiar livestock on the continent, however. Horses and other beasts of burden were no match for tsetse flies and parasites that carried diseases. But native animals had developed resistance to the natural environmental hazards. What if the hardy zebra were to be domesticated and put to work? It was an intriguing idea, and a zebra named Dan was put to work to test a theory. Dan was a gift from the King of Abyssinia (now a part of Ethiopia) to President Theodore Roosevelt in 1904.
As Western interests in Africa and other challenging climates for livestock transport expanded, these traits raised questions about whether zebras might be domesticated. Arriving in the U.S., Dan quickly became the focus of a government program that sought to domesticate the zebra by cross-breeding the animals with domestic horses and donkeys.
It didn’t go well. Dan was unruly, known for attacking his caretakers, and uncooperative with efforts to cross-breed with other equids. A 1913 summary of the program, published in The American Breeder’s Magazine, describes how Dan refused the mares brought to him. Dan was said to have “a positive aversion” to his horse counterparts, and when one was let loose in his paddock, he “rushed at the mare, and would undoubtedly have killed her had he not been driven back into his stall.” He did, however, ultimately mate successfully with a number of jennies (female donkeys).
But zebras and donkeys are different species, and Dan's progeny were sterile. The zebra's wild animal behavior convinced researchers that crossbreeding zebras just wasn't worth the effort. Yet Dan, who lived until 1919, is still teaching us about the traits of zebras and other equines, including the history of how horses were domesticated, which you can read about at Smithsonian.
Remember the "talking rings" from the 1960 movie The Time Machine? If only we had information technology that required no power or additional technology to decipher it. But that's not the case. In our own homes, we have trouble accessing home movies if they were recorded on VHS or even DVDs. How many time capsules contain those formats instead of printed photographs that anyone can access? Nick Yablon, author of the book Remembrance of Things Present: The Invention of the Time Capsule, began researching time capsules when he found a reference to them from 1911. They go back at least as far as 1876, although the term wasn't coined until later. He addressed the problem of time capsule packers who assumed the future would be somewhat consistent with the present.
Sometimes the diversity of media materials that time capsule contributors thought would be useful for future historians hindered Yablon’s understanding rather than aided it—such as when Yablon came across phonography cylinders from 1901. “Researchers couldn’t directly use those wax cylinders,” he told Perspectives. “They were quite fragile.” Archivists had to carefully extract the music for anyone who wished to hear them. Wax cylinders weren’t the only unusual items Yablon came across in his research. San Francisco-based dentist Henry D. Cogswell’s 1879 time capsule—which Cogswell called a “great Antiquarian Postoffice [sic]”—included “a box of breath sweeteners, a mechanical pencil, a souvenir pen and bud vase from the Centennial Exposition, a silk bookmark, a wooden puzzle, a paperweight . . . and, presumably Cogswell’s own contribution, some false teeth.” In an interview with Perspectives, Yablon said that, while researching the book, he also came across a piece of “corn on the cob in an Oklahoma time capsule [from] 1913.” (“It was in fairly good condition,” Yablon added.)
On the other hand, those physical objects could be things you'd find in any antique store -except maybe the corn. It could be that 100 years isn't long enough to bury a time capsule, as long as there's no soon-to-be-obsolete information format inside. Read about the history of the time capsule, including the philosophies behind the different kinds of them, at Perspectives on History. -via Damn Interesting
Pavel Jirásek has way too much time on his hands, and for that, I am thankful. This video gets really amazing around the two minute mark. It was edited from original footage by ACETrainsUK. -via Metafilter
George was a Jack Russell terrier who lived in Manaia, Taranaki, New Zealand. In 2007, a group of five children were walking home when they were attacked by two pit bulls. Nine-year-old George raced to defend the children, and was gravely injured in the fight. His owner, Alan Gay, reluctantly consented to euthanasia. George was posthumously awarded a medal for bravery by the Royal New Zealand Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and the People's Dispensary for Sick Animals awarded George the PDSA Gold Medal. Soon after the incident, this statue by artist Fridtjof Hanson went up in Manaia, where George will never be forgotten. That's a good dog. -via reddit
A mountain rescue team finds a skier who needs help. But this is the day that everything will go wrong. More so than you ever imagined, but you'll still laugh. The award-winning French short Hors Piste was directed by Léo Brunel, Loris Cavalier, Camille Jalabert, and Oscar Malet, students at the Ecole des Nouvelles Images.
Soon after the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, the US government began rounding up people of Japanese descent along the West Coast. The first ones incarcerated were the Issei, men who immigrated from Japan before 1907 and by law could not become American citizens. The dragnet expanded over the next year, and thousands of American-born citizens were sent to facilities such as racetracks to live until the inland internment camps were built and ready to receive them. Two-thirds of the population of the camps were American, and the immigrant Issei not only suffered from the disruption of their lives, but also found themselves surrounded by young second-generation Nissei who barely knew the Japanese language. But they got to work, first building all the things the internees needed but couldn't bring with them, then by producing art to restore the soul, decorate the camps, and pass the time. Some of these long-forgotten art objects were eventually sought out and enshrined in the book The Art of Gaman: Arts and Crafts from the Japanese American Internment Camps 1942-1946 by Delphine Hirasuna, who tells us what she learned while researching the art of the camps.
What’s impressive when you look through The Art of Gaman is not just how beautiful these objects are, but also the ingenious use of found materials, putting todays’ upcyclers to shame. Because the camps were built so hastily, the Corps of Engineers and WRA contractors left piles of scrap wood lying within reach.
“I have pictures of the scrap piles,” Hirasuna says. “There was so much lumber around that people were grabbing it and using it to build chairs and other furniture. Because the Army was still building the camps when the Japanese Americans were moved in, the workmen would discover that their hammers and saws were disappearing. When I’d ask Nisei about it, I’d say, ‘Did your father steal a hammer or saw?’ One woman told me, ‘No. Nobody admits to stealing, but everybody admits to knowing somebody who did.'”
Butter knives from the kitchen, with the help of the furnaces, were turned into scissors, pliers, carving knives, and chisels. To me, a Gen Xer, it’s amazing to see all these things that were made from hand with very little resources. But I have to remind myself that in the time between the Civil War and World War II, Americans were still making many things by hand, building furniture and barns, sewing their own clothes, some even doing their own blacksmithing. Issei men who were born in Japan were likely trained in the art of joinery, which is helpful when you need to make furniture and can’t buy nails.
“Certainly, the first generation of Japanese men came to America as itinerant workers around the turn of the century,” says Hirasuna, who is a Baby Boomer. “They learned to make-do and be ingenious in solving problems. At camp, probably some of them said, ‘Hey, I helped build the railroads, so I know how they use those furnaces to throw coal and forge railroad ties.’ I don’t think our generation could do that. Those were the times when housewives were canning and men repaired their own farm equipment. Everybody knew how to sew their own clothes. If my generation were incarcerated today, I’d be completely lost. I’d have to order from Amazon.”
You know how you see painted portraits from 400 years ago, and the subject is wearing clothing with a fancy print? That wasn't printed fabric, but more likely hand-stitched embroidery, an art form available only to the wealthy. The needlework artists developed ever-fancier techniques, such as 3D relief stitching, that incorporated not only thread, but pearls, precious gems, and metal sequins.
The “Jacobean” style of needlework isn’t so much a kind of sewing technique as it is a vibe (and a reference to the Latin translation of King James I). It refers to a kind of mood board wherein highly stylised mythical creatures, plants, and maidens reign supreme. The Tree of Life was a popular motif. So too were cherubs, chivalrous scenes, or imagery inspired by England’s most recent trade partner: India.
“Crewel” and “stump” work sewing techniques created complex layers of metal, silk and wool threads, adding a richness and dimension to the designs that made them, quite literally, rise from the surface. This included not just clothing and accessories, but precious boxes called “caskets” and hand-sewn “paintings,” frames, and wall panels.
