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A List of Don'ts for Women on Bicycles circa 1895 | Brain Pickings
We’ve already seen how the bicycle emancipated women , but it wasn’t exactly a smooth ride. The following list of 41 don’ts for female cyclists was published in 1895 in the newspaper New York World by an author of unknown gender. Equal parts amusing and appalling, the list is the best (or worst, depending on you look at it) thing since the Victorian map of woman’s heart . For more on the history of women and bikes, see the excellent Wheels of Change , among both the best photography books and the best history books of 2011. via m-bike HT MetaFilter In 2011, bringing you Brain Pickings took more than 5,000 hours .
It’s no secret we’re big fans of Edward Gorey’ s, mid-century illustrator of the macabre, whose work influenced generations of creators, from Nine Inch Nails to Tim Burton. Between September 1968 and October 1969, Gorey set out to collaborate on three children’s books with author and editor Peter F. Neumeyer and, over the course of this 13-month period, the two exchanged a series of letters on topics that soon expanded well beyond the three books and into everything from metaphysics to pancake recipes.
Floating Worlds: Edward Gorey's Never-Before-Seen Letters and Illustrated Envelopes | Brain Pickings
7 Must-Read Books on Education | Brain Pickings
Education is something we’re deeply passionate about, but the fact remains that today’s dominant formal education model is a broken system based on antiquated paradigms.
The Ancient Book of Sex and Science | Brain Pickings
This summer, four insanely talented Pixar animators — Scott Morse , Nate Wragg , Lou Romano , and Don Shank — got together and released a racy side project exploring, in broad color and evocative commentary, humanity’s most popular topic from the least likely of angles.
At around 6AM on the morning of August 28, 1854, the Lewis infant started vomiting and excreting greenish stools with a pungent smell.
The Ghost Map: Lessons in Epidemiology from Victorian London | Brain Pickings
It’s graduation season, so commencement addresses by actors, politicians, writers, musicians and other luminaries are sweeping the world of higher education across the entire spectrum of mediocrity and profound wisdom.
5 Timeless Commencement Addresses | Brain Pickings
From Darth Vader to Jesus: Famous Lives in Minimalist Pictograms | Brain Pickings
From Milan-based creative agency H-57 comes this brilliant series of minimalist pictogram posters for the life-and-times of famous characters, both fictional and historical, from Darth Vader to Marie Antoinette to Jesus — part Isotype , part Everything Explained Through Flowcharts , part something entirely and ingeniously its own.“Cities are the crucible of civilization,” proclaimed Geoffrey West at last month’s TED Global .
Understanding Urbanity: 7 Must-Read Books About Cities | Brain Pickings
It’s Earth Day, so what better time to spotlight some of the smartest, most compelling thinking in sustainability from the past few years, and what better place for these ideas to manifest themselves than the TED stage? Today, we’re curating our five favorite sustainability-related TED talks of the past five years — from eye-opening revelations to ideological landmarks.
Earth Day the TED Way | Brain Pickings
The Stanford Prison Experiment Turns 40 | Brain Pickings
Forty years ago today, the Stanford Prison Experiment began — arguably history’s most notorious and controversial psychology experiment, which gleaned powerful and unsettling insights into human nature. Orchestrated by Stanford researcher Philip Zimbardo , the study randomly assigned 24 middle-class college-aged males, recruited via newspaper classifieds and pre-screened to have no mental health issues or criminal history, to the roles of prisoners and prison guards in a hyper-realistic simulated prison environment. Though the guards were instructed to under no circumstances harm the prisoners physically, they were encouraged to think of themselves as actual prison guards and instill in the inmates a sense of powerlessness, frustration and “arbitrariness,” to make them fully believe that their lives were controlled entirely by “the system” and that they had no freedom of action whatsoever.
Last month, we watched 50 famous academics discuss God in a mashup video by British neurosurgeon Jonathan T. Pararajasingham , a fine addition to the ongoing conversation on science vs. religion and the psychology of faith .
50 Famous Scientists on God, Part 2 | Brain Pickings
Illustrated Portraits by 80 of the World's Most Exciting Artists | Brain Pickings
Hardly does the responsibility of art get more intricate than in portraiture, with its expectation of capturing a person’s entire character and history with a few strokes of the proverbial brush. We’ve recently looked at Platon’s powerful portraits of political leaders and Noma Bar’s brilliant negative-space illustrated portraits of cultural icons . Today, we turn to Illustration Now!25 JANUARY, 2011 by Maria Popova
Animating Reality: A Collection of Short Animated Documentaries | Brain Pickings
Bruce Gilden on the Other Side of The Camera | Brain Pickings
Bruce Gilden is easily the most iconic street photographer of our time, particularly notorious for his merciless and indiscriminate use of the flash. Rich and raw at the same time, his portraits live inhabit the strange and mesmerizing world of orchestrated spontaneity.Despite our remarkable technological progress in the past century and the growth of digital culture in the past decade, a large portion of humanity’s richest cultural heritage remains buried in analog archives. Bridging the disconnect is a fledgling discipline known as the Digital Humanities, bringing online historical materials and using technologies like infrared scans, geolocation mapping, and optical character recognition to enrich these resources with related information or make entirely new discoveries about them.