241–250 of 360 posts
As an old man I now think the art and humanities classes in school landed at the wrong time. You need context to really understand a book or a work of art. You want to know what kind of environment produced it, what it's talking to. But when you're in school, there isn't time for that. You aren't going to know a bunch of things about history to put things into context, because there simply isn't enough time for it. S…
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This is a really good point. My wife and I produce a history podcast where, right now, a lot of it draws on primary sources such as letters, diaries, etc. from the late 1800's to early 1900's. The ones in German she translates into English, but it feels "wrong" to change someone's words that are already in English. The net result is that it's easier (for me) to understand a letter written by someone in a translated f…
What’s been your favorite episode to put together?
[1] https://www.messyhistory.net/a-jew-who-stood-guard-for-hitle...
How conditioned am I? I thought the title was a play on "em dashes" and when I got into the second paragraph and saw em dashes I immediately flipped to assuming I was reading a story from some never-lived life manifest by a diffusion model. I don't think it is. But that is irrelevant. The point is if our content cannot avoid or ultimately pass the sniff test it won't have the impact we hope.
I’ve long held the opinion that humans ‘over’-value complexity . It’s why we can spend so much time tasting, analyzing, and enjoying fancy coffee or whisky - despite the fact that almost everyone is repulsed by them the first time they try them. Literature might be the same? To be clear, I enjoy all three!
I suppose with an experience I'm taking value as a synonym for enjoyment level, I'm not sure what else it means in that context.
I guess you can enjoy something to the detriment of your focus on other things and then to your overall wellbeing. But idunno if someone being really into analyzing fancy coffee or something counts.
The thickness of some caves in terms of genuine girth is truly something to marvel at.
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Rant: I missed lot of Shakespeare appreciation when they somehow failed to teach that (other) people actually like how iambic pentameter sounds, and this is critical to enjoying it. Nothing about how Shakespeare is voiced has ever registered as sounding particularly pleasant to me. The word choice, sure, but not the meter or stressing. They taught that Shakespeare used iambic pentameter, and how you're "supposed" to…
Yeah, Shakespeare is not going to land if iambic pentameter doesn't sound like anything special to you. It's a big part of why many Shakespearean quotes stick so hard in people's brains, like 'To be or not to be', 'But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?' and 'If music be the food of love, play on'. If all of these have to carry their weight with only their literal words on the page, and not how they're ac…
Also, when I tried rewriting that soliloquy for modern ears, it didn't even occur to me to keep the meter; that never registered as a noteworthy aspect of it.
One other thing: keep in mind what it's like to be in high school. For the vast majority of your life, you're told to do things "because I said so". So the idea that there might be an actual good reason for stressing Shakespeare the right way ... didn't stand out as an obvious hypothesis.
Edit: found a zoomable version!
Those who use ChatGPT for research should be advised that it will add `?utm_source=chatgpt.com` to the URLs it provides you. Make sure to edit that away if you don't want people to know. And also, you know, make sure you verify the source.