Roundtable

The Rest Is History

Think twice about using history as a salve, marvel at the computers of the past, and cover everything in butter.

By Erin Vanderhoof

Friday, November 11, 2016

 Jane Jacobs at a press conference, 1960. Library of Congress.

• Looking to the past to soothe us in the present might not be a great strategy: “There’s also an ethical problem with pointing to previous survivals as evidence of future resilience. ‘We’—the United States—got through slavery and the Civil War. But many people suffered heavily under slavery, many others died in that war, and more are still paying the price of the discrimination that followed the collapse of Reconstruction, and that continues today. This ‘we made it’ perspective privileges the winners of history—the ones who weren’t broken or wrecked by the machines they found themselves battling. Sometimes—often—the people who made it through these crises did so not by dint of their own merit, but by sheer chance.” (Slate)

• More proof that King George III was, unsurprisingly, very displeased with the American Revolution. He was also a very involved father. (Smithsonian Magazine)

• A Brooklyn monument to failed presidential campaigns. (The New Yorker Culture Desk)

• Leibniz’s “combinatorial art” in the modern era: “While Leibniz made groundbreaking contributions towards the modern binary number system as well as integral and differential calculus, his role in the history of computing amounts to more than the sum of his scientific and technological accomplishments. He also advanced what we might consider a kind of ‘computational imaginary’—reflecting on the analytical and generative possibilities of rendering the world computable.” (Public Domain Review)

• Is coeducation feminist? Maybe not. (Aeon)

• Charles Baudelaire and Guillaume Apollinaire’s takes on fairy tales, replete with black humor, will be reissued this year: “Each story comes with a twist, from a wolf who is tricked by Red Riding Hood into strangling the girl’s grandmother and is then arrested for being an anarchist (‘I did 20 years of hard labour, while the slut inherited her grandmother’s savings”’) to a Cinderella keen to be humiliated.” (The Guardian)

• A brief history of butter: “You wouldn’t recognize the world’s earliest butters. For one thing, they were made from the milk of sheep, yak, and goats, not from cow’s milk. Domesticated cattle came much later in man’s conquest of various animals. From as early as 9000 BCE in the region of what is now Iran, communities relied on domestic sheep and goats, which are less intimidating in size and have comfort-loving dispositions that early man coaxed into submission. In the Near East, domesticated goats functioned as a virtual power tool and dairy plant for early man as well, defoliating the scrubby land as they grazed so it could then be cultivated. The animals turned this coarse plant diet into a ready source of good meat and milk. Goat’s skin, being nonporous, also provided an excellent milk vessel.” (Lucky Peach)

• Jane Jacobs on the necessity of civil disobedience. (Literary Hub)