The Wordsmith's Forge

... is repeating itself.  This post compares Washington, D.C. with occupied Berlin from the perspective of someone who's seen both.

Never forget.

Ancient bees turned tooth sockets into tiny nurseries 20,000 years ago

A stunning fossil discovery shows that ancient bees used the empty tooth sockets of mammal bones as tiny nests after owls scattered the bones across a cave floor 20,000 years ago. It's the first known evidence of bees nesting inside animal bones, revealing an astonishingly creative survival strategy.


Fascinating. It seems to be a unique but likely extinct species of bee which nested in bones, but without any actual bee remains, this cannot be proven.

They're from the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic, though so feel free to toss them into Peculiar Obligations as a prompt.

Childbirth room? It’s next to the period room … the astonishing Kerala homes designed for women’s bodies

The tharavad is a traditional style of housing designed for and run by women. Our writer went on a pilgrimage to find her own family’s – and uncovered a way of life fast disappearing.


Just because this version is fading doesn't prevent us from envisioning or building another structure based on women's needs.

Scientists stunned by signs of ancient life in a place no one expected

Strange wrinkles in ancient Moroccan rocks may be the preserved fingerprints of deep-sea microbes that lived without sunlight 180 million years ago.

Scientists exploring ancient seafloor rocks in Morocco discovered mysterious wrinkle patterns where they were never expected to occur. These structures are normally linked to microbial mats in shallow, sunlit waters, yet the rocks formed hundreds of feet below the surface in darkness. Evidence indicates that chemosynthetic microbes created the wrinkles, revealing that deep-ocean microbial ecosystems may have been more widespread than previously thought.

15 forgotten skills every 1950s boy mastered before 12

Step back to the 1950s with a glimpse into rural life, where childhood memories were made by creeks and willow sticks. here on America's Forgotten Fathers This vintage scene captures the simple joy of a boy with his pocket knives, engaging in wood carving. A wave of nostalgia is sure to wash over you, recalling simpler times.


This video is a little slanted, a little exaggerated, a lot nostalgic. Not all boys learned these skills; not everyone who did was a boy. Some children and even adults still learn them today. But it remains true that this is a bundle of highly useful survival skills that are vastly scarcer today than they used to be. That's a problem. So let's look at the featured skills...

( Read more... )

It’s Not the 1980s Men Miss. It’s This.

Sometimes I catch myself wishing I could rewind parts of the world to the 1980s and just leave it that way. Not to relive my youth or go back to some glory days. That's not what the fantasy is about. What I've started to realize is that when men my age long for that era, we're not really reaching for the past. We're reaching for specific things about how life worked back then that have quietly disappeared from modern life. Things most of us feel the absence of but haven't quite been able to name. In this video I try to name them. Because I think what we call nostalgia is actually something more important than nostalgia. It might be the most honest signal we have about what's gone missing and why daily life feels the way it does now.


This video is applied philosophy. Most philosophy is more abstract, so people think it's "head in the clouds" stuff. Applied philosophy is different. Philosophy in general is "thinking about thinking" -- what you think, how you think, what you feel and why, the meaning of things, that sort of stuff. The abstract branch is about applying that to humans in general. But the applied branch is about using that information on a more personal and practical level, to troubleshoot your life, your community, some process or organization that you're participating in. Philosophy gives you the skills to analyze things, much like science does, but with a different toolkit for things that are less concrete, replicable, and easy to test. That's the part you need most. So let's look at some things that have gotten worse, which ones are more or less fixable, and what you can do about that...

( Read more... )

1950s Marriage Family Nostalgia

A majority of Americans believe our country’s culture and way of life have “mostly changed for the worse” since the 1950s, according to the Public Religion Research Institute’s 2025 American Values Survey. That includes 55% of white people, 53% of Black people and 57% of Latinos.


Well, it's had a lot of ups and downs. Some things have changed for the better, others for the worse -- and indeed, some of the improvements led to disasters in other areas. I would say it has peaked, as we are now losing some hard-fought gains but we haven't gotten back things we lost from earlier.

( Read more... )

WHAT I MISS ABOUT THE EARLY (1996-2000) WORLD WIDE WEB

The Internet was dominated by kind of counter-cultural people

Then the mundanes showed up, and it began to suck -- much like what happened to fandom.

( Read more... )

A friend tipped me to this:

THE PLOTLAND HOUSES OF BRITAIN: HOW A 20TH CENTURY WORKING-CLASS HOUSING MOVEMENT WAS STIFLED

His piece of land cost him £10 in 1934. It is 40 ft wide by 100 ft deep. First, he put up a tent which his family used at weekends, and he gradually accumulated tools, timber and glass which he brought to the site strapped to his back as he cycled down from London. – Dennis Hardy & Colin Ward, Arcadia for All, 1984, p. 200

In the first half of the twentieth century, and particularly in the inter-war period, up to the 1947 Planning Act, the appearance throughout Britain of thousands of self-built shacks, chalets, recycled buses and railway carriages was considered by the powers-that-be as a terrible eyesore. Middle-class planners like Clough Williams-Ellis, architect of Portmeirion, the set of The Prisoner, considered them a ‘blot on the landscape’ that needed to be eradicated. But from another viewpoint, 80 years on, they look like the beginning of a postmodern urban vernacular. They were a new working-class architecture in the process of being evolved, that was brought to a halt through ignorance and class prejudice.

( Read more... )