Curating a digital commonplace to help me live life lovingly. Adoring the Beautiful, adorning the dark. “What is all this juice and all this joy?”
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Slightly Dryad 🌿 retweeted
Michael Pollan reveals how the introduction of caffeine completely changed human history and consciousness.
"Before caffeine, it was a very different world and a very different consciousness. People were drunk a lot of the time, buzzed almost all of the time because it was safer than water"
"Water was really how you got diseases. If you fermented things, even low alcohol, it killed a lot of the microbes. So people, even kids, drank hard cider for breakfast"
"Tea, chocolate, and coffee all arrive in the same decade in England, and things start to change... no one ate or drank boiling water or hot beverages before"
"Boiling it made it much safer. This gave this incredible public health boost to these places, and then you have the drug that fosters a kind of more linear, rational, focused way of thinking"
"People in the 1600s started writing about it saying, 'Wow, we have this new civil and sober drink that we can use.' And that, I think, makes possible things like the Industrial Revolution"
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
The clip repeats the myth that pre-caffeine people were mostly drunk because water was unsafe. Historians and medieval sources show water was commonly drunk from wells/springs while weak ale provided nutrition/calories, not a substitute for bad water.
leslefts.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-gr…
slate.com/human-interest…
fakehistoryhunter.net/2026/02/02/dri…
Austen is heir to Shakespeare and Samuel Johnson, an incisive satirist, a profound moralist, and in conversation with Aristotle and Hume. Her understanding of human nature is simply unmatched. Pride and Prejudice is the UR-romcom by which all others are judged.
It’s easy to take Jane Austen for granted because we live in the world that she created. We struggle to see how groundbreaking and innovative her novels are because they set the template for all modern fiction. Pride & Prejudice, to cite the most obvious example, did more than invent a genre. Anyone who now writes a story in which two people fall in love is either inspired by her or reacting against her. She’s like Tolkien in that sense.
But she did much more than that. She perfected a method of narration known as “free indirect discourse” that’s now used by virtually every writer. You have only to read the novels of pre-Austen writers to see what a tremendous difference she made through her use of this technique. Literary scholar John Mullan argues that Emma launched a revolution in form & technique that’s comparable to the innovations of Joyce and Proust. It is the favorite novel of Susanna Clarke and of Katherine Rundell, who calls it “a book that shows as much of the sweep of the human heart, of fear, love, morality, untruth, foolery and triumph as a Shakespearean drama.” It is also, arguably, the novel that invented the mystery genre, having what J. K. Rowling has called the biggest twist in literature. You don’t notice the greatness of Austen for the same reason a fish doesn’t know that it lives in water.
A dusting of snow in the mountains and golden afternoon sunlight streaming in the windows can only mean it’s time to make soup and break out “Ashokan Farewell.”
A docent at the Maritime Museum told me it is a nearly perfect film in its sailing/historical accuracy—until the end when the Surprise makes the dramatic turn to chase the Acheron and it’s clearly under motor power and not wind.
I wrote about my love for the film Master and Commander, in honour of Trafalgar Day this week spectator.com/article/in-pra…
“And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers…”
St Crispin's Day - which means it's #Agincourt time! OTD at Azincourt in 1415, forces under Henry V scored an unexpected victory against the French, an event made ever-famous by Mr Wm. Shakespeare. Noteworthy was the rapid fire of his archers, the machine-gunners of their day.
SO excited, but if they start singing “Camelot” at any point, it might be the greatest podcast ever to have podcasted
Slightly Dryad 🌿 retweeted
Just overheard a tiny little girl on the street saying the weather is getting “puddlier and puddlier” and that’s the new word for this year.
This time I was struck the grittiness of her virtue in the face of claustrophobic malevolence and the sublimation of her own desires. She could let suffering twist and consume her as Rosa Dartle does, but she doesn’t. She faces facts, unlike Dora, and acts with courage.
Her goodness is presented as somewhat innate, but also weathered and hard won, and that makes the payoff when David comes to his senses the more heartfelt. She’s more interesting than I used to think, because it really is hard to suffer well, and virtue does requires toughness.