In 1502, Leonardo submitted to the Ottoman sultan a design for a bridge over the Golden Horn in Istanbul that would have been, at the time, by far the world’s longest, and tall enough for ships to pass underneath. The skeptical sultan rejected Leonardo’s plan, but a team at MIT has modeled it out and says that, with materials and technology available at the time, the bridge would have held up. – Ars Technica
Tag: 10.16.19
Netflix’s U.S. Subscriber Growth Is Slowing As Competitors Ramp Up
This is a bit of a problem for the massive company: “The big question now is whether some of Netflix’s existing subscribers will decide to cancel its service and defect to cheaper alternatives that Apple and Disney will launch within the next month.” Or will the other two just be add-ons for people who get most of what they want through Netflix? The company is counting on it. – The New York Times (AP)
The Radical Personal Life Of Johann Sebastian Bach
“I’ve talked to people who feel they know Bach very well, but they aren’t aware of the time he was imprisoned for a month. They never learned about Bach pulling a knife on a fellow musician during a street fight. They never heard about his drinking exploits—on one two-week trip he billed the church eighteen gorchsen for beer, enough to purchase eight gallons of it at retail prices—or that his contract with the Duke of Saxony included a provision for tax-free beer from the castle brewery; or that he was accused of consorting with an unknown, unmarried woman in the organ loft; or had a reputation for ignoring assigned duties without explanation or apology.” – Lapham’s Quarterly
The Real Problem With Cancel Culture
“The entire cancel culture conversation, including the debate over whether or not it exists at all, has largely missed a crucial point. While celebrities, successful artists, and other too-big-to-fail types can survive a cancellation (or even seek one out as a means of drumming up publicity), the rest of us are trapped in an increasingly deranged surveillance state fueled by the disappearance of our most essential resource: trust.” – Tablet
Epistolary Memoir, An Old Genre Having A New Heyday
The recounting of a life in the form of a letter may go all the way back to Benjamin Franklin, but it’s currently seeing a revival, kicked off by Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me and carried by major works by Imani Perry, Terese Marie Mailhot, Ocean Vuong, and others. “The new epistolary memoirs, however,” writes Parul Sehgal, “are less interested in stitching a life into a tidy narrative shroud than in ripping it from its seams.” – The New York Times
James Wood: Harold Bloom’s “Anxiety Of Influence”
“You mistook him for no one else: the late, popular style was a faded fan, but it was still recognizably Bloom’s old peacockery. The leaping links, hieratic cross-referencing, and amusingly camp self-involvement—the sense you got that everything made sense inside Bloom’s head, that everyone connected with everyone else within the huge Oedipal family he had made of literature—had been there from the beginning, somewhat masked by the scholarly density and relative propriety of his early work.” – The New Yorker
Why Are Instagram Experiences Referred To As “Museums”
These immersive experiences are branded as exhibits, but that might be where the link to traditional museums ends. The companies are, after all, for-profit businesses that sell experiences that have been expressly created for social media postability. – CityLab
Librarians Protest Publishers’ Plan To Limit Their Access To E-Books
Beginning Nov. 1, Macmillan Publishers, one of the so-called Big Five publishing companies in North America, will only allow libraries to purchase one copy of each new e-book for the first eight weeks after it has been released. Librarians who say the decision is unfair to readers are campaigning against it. – CBC
The twenty-five record albums that changed my life (2)
The public library in Smalltown, U.S.A., had a modest selection of classical albums. One of them was this two-disc set of “live” recordings by the first important classical-music instrumentalist whose playing I got to know well. – Terry Teachout
American English Preserves Old Grammar That British English Has Dropped
“The index of the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language mentions regional differences in 95 places. … In reality, America has often been the conservative one, and Britain the innovator. When British speakers borrow American habits, they are sometimes unwittingly readopting an older version of their language.” (One surprising example: the subjunctive.) – The Economist