Reviews and News:

A history of the closet: “The closets of Early Modern Europe were private studies, media cabinets, epistemological architectures. In a private log, in 1556, Sir William Moore recorded the contents of his closet: ‘various maps, a writing slate, a perpetual calendar, a calculating board and a purse of counters, an ink stand, coffers, sets of weights and balances, a globe, scissors, seals, compasses, pens, a hammer, a penknife, a foot-rule, and a vast selection of texts in English, French, Italian, and Latin,’ much of which was likely kept under lock and key... With the rise of industrialism and home consumer goods, closets became storage spaces for clothing, personal effects, and household equipment — boxes, glasses, pots, bottles, jugs, conserve jars, and so forth. They took on specialized identities, too: the dressing room, the study, the library, the gallery. Yet according to Henry Urbach, the closet as a ‘new spatial type,’ a wall cavity adjacent to a proper room, did not emerge until around 1840 in the United States.”

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Tennis is the real loser at Wimbledon: “If we are witnessing the passing now of a golden generation, then what is coming after it has all the lustre of a pebble.”

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Joseph Bottum reviews Milo’s Dangerous: “While he had the Simon & Schuster contract for an autobiography, there were rumors that Yiannopoulos intended to produce the serious book he is clearly intelligent enough to write. And in Dangerous, he has the self-consciousness to try to situate his performances in the line of Lenny Bruce and later shock comedians. At the same time, he makes some moves toward defending his conservatism not simply as an attempt to épater la bourgeoisie at a time in which the bourgeoisie are dominated by leftist pieties but as part of the Great Tradition of conservatism, from Thomas Aquinas to James Madison. There are even a handful of near Chestertonian formulations. But it all amounts to very little. Dangerous is a book mostly in the way that something by Bill O'Reilly or any other media figure is a book: short paragraphs strung together to pander to an audience.”

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Why ancient Roman concrete is better than modern mixes: “The Roman recipe – a mix of volcanic ash, lime (calcium oxide), seawater and lumps of volcanic rock – held together piers, breakwaters and harbours. Moreover, in contrast to modern materials, the ancient water-based structures became stronger over time. Scientists say this is the result of seawater reacting with the volcanic material in the cement and creating new minerals that reinforced the concrete.”

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In Case You Missed It:

What Philip Larkin’s personal objects tell us about the poet: He was obsessed with his appearance, owned a Hitler figurine, and thought of Monica Jones as an editor more than muse.

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A history of souvenirs: “The souvenir is a relatively recent concept. The word only began to refer to an ‘object, rather than a notion’ in the late eighteenth century. Of course, the practice of carrying a small token away from an important location is ancient. In Europe, souvenirs evolved from religious relics. Pilgrims in the late Roman and Byzantine eras removed stones, dirt, water, and other organic materials from pilgrimage sites, believing that ‘the sanctity of holy people, holy objects and holy places was, in some manner, transferable through physical contact.’ We might call this logic synecdochic: the sacred power of the holy site is thought to remain immanent in pieces of it, chips from a temple or vials of water from a well. As leisure travel became more common, souvenir commodities evolved from relics.”

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“One of the world’s most confounding literary mysteries may finally be, in part, solved: the author of the mysterious and as-yet untranslatable Voynich manuscript has been identified as a Jewish physician based in northern Italy, an expert in medieval manuscripts has claimed.”

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Ezra Pound’s asylum years: “As Daniel Swift puts it in The Bughouse, his lively and searching account of Pound’s years at St Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, DC, from 1946 to 1958, it was ‘the world’s least orthodox literary salon: convened by a fascist, held in a lunatic asylum’.

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Interview: Pamela Paul talks about the history of the London Zoo and scary stories for children in this week’s NYT’s books podcast

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Classic Essay: Bertrand de Jouvenel, "The Reactionary Rousseau"

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