Kay Nielsen's Stunning 1914 Illustrations of Scandinavian Fairy Tales. By Maria Popova As a lover of illustrated fairy tales and having just returned from Sweden, I was delighted to discover, thanks to the relentlessly wonderful 50 Watts, East of the Sun and West of the Moon: Old Tales from the North (public library; public domain) — a collection of Scandinavian fairy tales, illustrated by Danish artist Kay Rasmus Nielsen (1886-1957), whose work you might recall from the all-time greatest illustrations of Brothers Grimm and the fantastic visual history of Arabian Nights.
Originally published in 1914, this magnificent tome of 15 stories was recently reissued by Calla Editions, the same Dover imprint that revived Harry Clarke’s magnificent illustrations for Edgar Allan Poe, and features 25 color illustrations, along with a slew of black-and-white ones, in Nielsen’s singular style of haunting whimsy. ↬ 50 Watts.
Explore. Coach House Books. How Children Learn: Portraits of Classrooms Around the World. By Maria Popova A revealing lens on a system-phenomenon both global in reach and strikingly local in degree of diversity.
Since 2004, Julian Germain has been capturing the inner lives of schools around the world, from England to Nigeria to Qatar, in his large-scale photographs of schoolchildren in class. Classroom Portraits (public library) is part Where Children Sleep, part Bureaucratics, part What I Eat: Around the World in 80 Diets, part something else entirely — a poignant lens on a system-phenomenon that is both global in reach and strikingly local in degree of peculiarity, revealed through more than 450 portraits of schoolchildren from 20 countries. Jessore, Bangladesh. Year 10, English. Image courtesy Julian Germain Brazil, Belo Horizonte, Series 6, Mathematics USA, St Louis, Grade 4 & 5, Geography Nigeria, Kano, Ooron Dutse, Senior Islamic Secondary Level 2, Social Studies.
A collection of ridiculously interesting art, objects, ideas, and history. About. Hey there.
My name is Maria Popova and I’m a reader, writer, interestingness hunter-gatherer, and curious mind at large. I’ve previously written for Wired UK, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab, among others, and am an MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow. Maria Popova. Photograph by Elizabeth Lippman for The New York Times Brain Pickings is my one-woman labor of love — a subjective lens on what matters in the world and why. Founded in 2006 as a weekly email that went out to seven friends and eventually brought online, the site was included in the Library of Congress permanent web archive in 2012. Here’s a little bit about my seven most important learnings from the journey so far. I think of it as LEGOs — if the bricks we have are of only one shape, size, and color, we can build things, but there’s a limit to how imaginative and interesting they will be. Please enjoy. Donating = Loving Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter.