At The Public Domain Review, Nicholas Jeeves considers the role of the smile in portraiture, touching on the 18th century Rules of Christian Decorum and Civility and its advice on smiling so as to show the teeth: This is entirely contradictory to decorum, which forbids you to allow your teeth to be uncovered, since nature…
Some questionable attribution, but an enjoyable jaunt through Europe’s ever changing borders at a thousand years per minute here.
At foreignpolicy.com, Charlie Stross considers generations, loyalty, work and surveillance: Generation Z will arrive brutalized and atomized by three generations of diminished expectations and dog-eat-dog economic liberalism. Most of them will be so deracinated that they identify with their peers and the global Internet culture more than their great-grandparents’ post-Westphalian nation-state. The machineries of the…
In the context of recent events in Syria, discussion of a 2007 article by Eisensee and Strömberg at The Duck of Minerva: Based on their study of 5,000 natural disasters between 1968 and 2002, they find that “U.S. policy makers are less likely to declare disasters during the Olympics, and in general when other newsworthy…