Welcome to Friday,
I have been a bit under the weather this week with allergies, so I’ll keep my introduction short.
Here is best from around the Internet this week:
This essay sent me down an enjoyable Internet rabbit hole: “Some men are by nature insatiable in drinking wine, others are born cormorants of books…”, so cautions an eighteenth-century catalog of bookish blights.
Why is the word ‘indict‘ pronounced to rhyme with ‘delight’ instead of ‘verdict’?
Around the globe, more and more cities are implementing the idea of 20-minute neighborhoods, communities where education, parks, doctors, and essential shops are within a twenty minute walk, bike, or public transit ride. The major hurdle (especially in the United States) preventing such cities and communities from growing this way organically seems to zoning laws, dictating the legal usages of a particular parcel of land, though many cities are doing away with overly burdensome restrictions. This piece looks at the logistics of making those changes in Melbourne, Australia. Compliment with a look at how Paris is implementing the same idea, inspired by Jane Jacobs’ 1961 classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
On Georgina Hogarth, confidante, house-keeper, sister-in-law, and adviser to Charles Dickens.
Images of ‘the future’ promised us all a push-button society, but instead we live in a scroll and swipe one. The always insightful Ted Gioia traces how Skinner Boxes have taken over our “social” lives, and why today’s scrolls are entirely different from the scrolls where written language originated.
Currently reading: Persuasion by Jane Austen
Have a lovely Easter holiday and weekend.
Photo by TOMOKO UJI on Unsplash
