Through the 1930s and ‘40s, Esquire illustrations by Russian-American designer Count Alexis de Sakhnoffsky depicted rooms in offices and homes, as well as airplanes, cars, and motorboats, with streamlined curves. The aerodynamic lines suggested dynamic “masculine” efficiency and power, Osgerby writes, but their organic shapes also pointed to a “feminine” smoothing of sharp modernist design.
Author Archives: lookingbeyondborders
Will London Fall?
What happens next? No one really knows. Pro-Brexit Britons are happy, of course, even if headaches will follow. This is probably the noisiest and most complicated divorce in modern European history. London is still busy, the Tube is still packed and the pubs are still full. But it is a weird moment. The certainties that sustained a great city are no longer certain.
P.G. Wodehouse, Great American Humourist?
Should P.G. Wodehouse be considered an American humorist as well as a master of British farce? Based on his voluminous fiction, Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, KBE (1881-1975), known as “Plum” to his friends, certainly comes across as the quintessential Englishman.
A Much-Maligned Mughal
Aurangzeb Alamgir, the sixth ruler of the Mughal Empire, is the most hated king in Indian history. He ruled for nearly 50 years, from 1658 until 1707, the last great imperial power in India before British colonialism. According to many, he destroyed India politically, socially and culturally.
Philosophy Tool Kit
Philosophers pride themselves on thinking clearly by seeing what follows from what, exposing sophisms, spotting fallacies, and generally policing our reasoning. Many have spent years honing their skills, often deploying them on arcane topics. But these skills are not the exclusive property of rarefied sages, accessed only with a secret handshake and insider training, as much as some philosophers wish this were so.
Darwin Was A Slacker And You Should Be Too
When you examine the lives of history’s most creative figures, you are immediately confronted with a paradox: They organize their lives around their work, but not their days. Figures as different as Charles Dickens, Henri Poincaré, and Ingmar Bergman, working in disparate fields in different times, all shared a passion for their work, a terrific ambition to succeed, and an almost superhuman capacity to focus. Yet when you look closely at their daily lives, they only spent a few hours a day doing what we would recognize as their most important work.
Why Words Die
Biologists reckon that most species that have ever existed are extinct. That is true of words, too. Of the Oxford English Dictionary’s 231,000 entries, at least a fifth are obsolete. They range from “aa”, a stream or waterway (try that in Scrabble), to “zymome”, “that constituent of gluten which is insoluble in alcohol”.
Why Literature Is The Ultimate Big-Data Challenge
In a few decades, statistical analysis of literature has gone from crackpot theorising to cutting-edge research
The Case For Shyness
Shyness, that single emotion that encompasses so many different things—embarrassment, timidity, a fear of rejection, a reluctance to be inconvenient—is, despite its extreme commonality, also extremely mysterious. Is it a mere feeling? A personality-defining condition? A form of anxiety?
Intelligence: A History
To say that someone is or is not intelligent has never been merely a comment on their mental faculties. It is always also a judgment on what they are permitted to do. Intelligence, in other words, is political.
This Day And That 