"Do not urge against me my love of independence, my decided opinions, my ardor or character; these shall not be monsters erecting their ears, and bristling at every shadow; I will smooth their shaggy manes, and make them strong steeds to bear me over every obstacle."
— Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Theory of Teaching (1830) p. 6 (Unitarian, educator, author)
(Source: uuquotes)
"I wonder that the time does not come when young men facing each other with intent to kill do not suddenly think of their homes and their loved ones and realizing that those on the other side must have the same thoughts, throw away their weapons of murder."
— Eleanor Roosevelt, as quoted in No Ordinary Time by Doris Kearns Goodwin.
Chick Flick Map by Rebecca Mock
Back from my mini pseudo-vacation week! Let the good charts roll.
"Year by year, more and more of the world gets disenchanted. Even the icy privacy of the arctic and antarctic circles is invaded. We have played Jack Horner with our earth, till there is never a plum left in it."
— James Russell Lowell (Unitarian, poet, statesman, reformer)
(Source: uuquotes)
Animal Wise, by Virginia Morell
Here is just a sample of the things in this book that blew my mind: Fish sing. Rats dream. Cats can count to four. Pigeons can tell the difference between a Monet and a Picasso. Lady rats prefer a guy who makes them laugh.
This book will fill you with facts like these, and it will make you think and worry and feel feelings about the question Morell poses in her epilogue: “GIven that we now know that we live in a world of sentient beings, not one of stimulus-response machines, how should we treat these other emotional, thinking creatures?”
It will also (if you are me) make you love and envy the scientists discovering the minds of the creatures we share a planet with. They do this work because they love the animals they study, or sometimes the other way around. They come to see the animals as colleagues.
Read this book, it’s great.
“We seem at the edge of a vast, expanding ocean of words, an ocean growing without any critical perspective whatever being brought to it. To me, as an editor, that seems an enormous absence.”
—Robert Silvers, founding editor of the New York Review of Books
“I have always been enchanted with the simultaneously permanent and ephemeral quality of the internet, and I believe that it is enough that it lives here and maybe it dies here. I just like that it even existed in the first place.”
—Jami Attenberg, author of The Middlesteins and more
myfirsthomelandshavebeenbooks:
Meg Hitchcock
The Satanic Verses
“Repentence” from the Koran
Letters cut from “The Satanic Verses” by Salman Rushdie
21 x 19 inches, 2012
see more of her work here
(via doubledaybooks)
nypl:
We were visiting the Maps Division today and spied a book from the fantastically-named Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, published around 1837. The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (also known as SDUK) published several interesting books for the diffusion of knowledge, including one about “Vegetable Substances,” many of which you can find at the Library.
(via bookoisseur)
"Very few researchers have looked into the feline mind. Those I spoke with emphasized that cats are bright—they’re quick observational learners, for instance—but because cats are independent creatures, getting them to repeat experiments (as is typically required in cognitive studies) is extraordinarily difficult. Immanuel Birmelin, an ethologist at the Society of Animal Behavior Research in Germany, explained how patient he’d had to be in order to run a test to see if cats can count. ‘One of the cats would do the test once in the morning—only!’ he recalled. ‘Another would do it once in the afternoon—only!’ It had taken him four years to show that cats can count to four."
— Virginia Morell, Animal Wise: The Thoughts and Emotions of Our Fellow Creatures
