The world is much larger
Postcard #17
Hello and welcome back to another edition of THE POSTCARD, Unregistered’s fortnightly roundup of recommendations.
Thoughts, tools, and treats
This week's articles remind us that the world has so much more to offer than the disgraceful spectacle we're getting reported in the news these days.
Beyond our comprehension
The Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist Ed Yong knows that the sensory capabilities as human beings are limited and „other creatures perceive things that we miss“ and „each of us is perceiving only a thin sliver of the fullness of reality.“ This, he adds, „is a wonderfully humbling concept.“
Unexpectedly useful
Useless knowledge can turn out to be quite useful, Jonathan Kujawa writes: „Non-Euclidean Geometry was an idle amusement until it was key to understanding spacetime and, in turn, gave us space travel and GPS. The numerology of elliptic curves was an esoteric glass bead game until it became the ubiquitous key ingredient of modern cryptography. The theory of Linear Algebra was developed with no idea that it would be essential to Google Search and the current AI explosion.“
Politcal dignity
Every so often, it falls to a Frenchman to help the world remember the values of the Enlightenment. These days, this task falls to Claude Malhuret: „Our parents defeated fascism and communism at the cost of great sacrifice. The task of our generation is to defeat the totalitarianisms of the 21st century.“
A life lived in full
Peter Sichel, who passed away in Manhattan earlier this month at the age of 102, has lived in England, France, postwar Berlin, Hong Kong, and New York. He was a refugee, a spy, and a wine merchant – all in one life.
An unlikely, fragile, beautiful moment
In 1975, under very adverse circumstances, the then 17-year-old Vera Brandes managed to convince Keith Jarrett to sit down at the piano: "If you don't play, I'm screwed - and so are you!" The rest is jazz history.
Noteworthy
“We both started at Time magazine in the early ’80s, a louche era of bars in offices, clouds of cigarette smoke, cascading illicit affairs, sumptuous dining carts of roast beef rolling down the halls and expense accounts so lavish that a top editor would think nothing of sending someone from Paris to London to fetch a necktie he had left in a hotel room.”
—Maureen Dowd, in her splendid portrait of Graydon Carter
A mystery link leading into the unknown
Close your eyes and...
As always,
Dirk
P.S.: Feel free to send me pointers to articles, books, sites, pods, tools, and treats that could be interesting for this roundup. While I cannot promise to link them, I read and appreciate every hint.