Sublime

Quarantines are back, the word itself referring to the forty days (quaranta giorni in Italian) that Venetians held ships away from the port when the ships were suspected of carrying plague. The policy of quarantine dates back to the late fourteenth century.

Richard Wurman says that the amount of information in a single daily New York Times is equivalent to that encountered by a seventeenth century literate person in an entire lifetime.

The 20th century was the best century yet across every metric that matters  It also had the biggest wars in history, the biggest genocide in history, the biggest existential threat yet with nuclear weapons, the biggest economic crash in history, etc.

A breakdown from nervous strain and overwork in 1869 left him incapacitated for nearly a year. Yet the headlong life resumed. The museum building was doubled in size. He embarked on still another venture, around Cape Horn to California with a Coast Survey expedition, and returned this time with some one hundred thousand specimens. And in the final

There are no more men like Henry Flagler, and there are no more dreams like his. Today we have software titans, and their minions who seek to bridge gaps measured in millimicrons and nanoseconds. Such accomplishment may be dizzying in its own right . . . but that kind of bridge-building…

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But little had changed in the science of hurricane forecasting between 1910 and 1935, and without the monster staring you in the eye, it is hard to fathom the reality of impending doom.

The last few decades have been the most peaceful era in human history. Whereas in early agricultural societies human violence caused up to 15 percent of all human deaths, and in the twentieth century it caused 5 percent, today it is responsible for only 1 percent.

Languages change and evolve organically. But it is perhaps paradoxically necessarily that languages must remain mostly unchanging — mostly common between their speakers — such that change can be recognized and contextualized, rather than simply disorienting.