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Young Mark Twain’s lost gem, the universe in illustrated dioramas, Maurice Sendak’s posthumous love letter to the world, Kafka for kids, and more treats for all ages.

“It is an error … to think of children as a special kind of creature, almost a different race, rather than as normal, if immature, members of a particular family, and of the human family at large,” J. R. R. Tolkien wrote in his superb meditation on fantasy and why there’s no such thing as writing “for children,” intimating that books able to captivate children’s imagination aren’t “children’s books” but simply really good books. After the year’s best books in psychology and philosophy, art and design, and history and biography, the season’s subjective selection of best-of reading lists continue with the loveliest “children’s” and picture-books of 2013. (Because the best children’s books are, as Tolkien believes, always ones of timeless delight, do catch up on the selections for 2012, 2011, and 2010.)

1. ADVICE TO LITTLE GIRLS

In 1865, when he was only thirty, Mark Twain penned a playful short story mischievously encouraging girls to think independently rather than blindly obey rules and social mores. In the summer of 2011, I chanced upon and fell in love with a lovely Italian edition of this little-known gem with Victorian-scrapbook-inspired artwork by celebrated Russian-born children’s book illustrator Vladimir Radunsky. I knew the book had to come to life in English, so I partnered with the wonderful Claudia Zoe Bedrick of Brooklyn-based indie publishing house Enchanted Lion, maker of extraordinarily beautiful picture-books, and we spent the next two years bringing Advice to Little Girls (public library) to life in America — a true labor-of-love project full of so much delight for readers of all ages. (And how joyous to learn that it was also selected among NPR’s best books of 2013!)

While frolicsome in tone and full of wink, the story is colored with subtle hues of grown-up philosophy on the human condition, exploring all the deft ways in which we creatively rationalize our wrongdoing and reconcile the good and evil we each embody.

Good little girls ought not to make mouths at their teachers for every trifling offense. This retaliation should only be resorted to under peculiarly aggravated circumstances.

If you have nothing but a rag-doll stuffed with sawdust, while one of your more fortunate little playmates has a costly China one, you should treat her with a show of kindness nevertheless. And you ought not to attempt to make a forcible swap with her unless your conscience would justify you in it, and you know you are able to do it.

One can’t help but wonder whether this particular bit may have in part inspired the irreverent 1964 anthology Beastly Boys and Ghastly Girls and its mischievous advice on brother-sister relations:

If at any time you find it necessary to correct your brother, do not correct him with mud — never, on any account, throw mud at him, because it will spoil his clothes. It is better to scald him a little, for then you obtain desirable results. You secure his immediate attention to the lessons you are inculcating, and at the same time your hot water will have a tendency to move impurities from his person, and possibly the skin, in spots.

If your mother tells you to do a thing, it is wrong to reply that you won’t. It is better and more becoming to intimate that you will do as she bids you, and then afterward act quietly in the matter according to the dictates of your best judgment.

Good little girls always show marked deference for the aged. You ought never to ‘sass’ old people unless they ‘sass’ you first.

Originally featured in April — see more spreads, as well as the story behind the project, here.

2. YOU ARE STARDUST

“Everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was … lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam,” Carl Sagan famously marveled in his poetic Pale Blue Dot monologue, titled after the iconic 1990 photograph of Earth. The stardust metaphor for our interconnection with the cosmos soon permeated popular culture and became a vehicle for the allure of space exploration. There’s something at once incredibly empowering and incredibly humbling in knowing that the flame in your fireplace came from the sun.

That’s precisely the kind of cosmic awe environmental writer Elin Kelsey and Toronto-based Korean artist Soyeon Kim seek to inspire in kids in You Are Stardust (public library) — an exquisite picture-book that instills that profound sense of connection with the natural world. Underpinning the narrative is a bold sense of optimism — a refreshing antidote to the fear-appeal strategy plaguing most environmental messages today.

Kim’s breathtaking dioramas, to which this screen does absolutely no justice, mix tactile physical materials with fine drawing techniques and digital compositing to illuminate the relentlessly wondrous realities of our intertwined existence: The water in your sink once quenched the thirst of dinosaurs; with every sneeze, wind blasts out of your nose faster than a cheetah’s sprint; the electricity that powers every thought in your brain is stronger than lightning.

But rather than dry science trivia, the message is carried on the wings of poetic admiration for these intricate relationships:

Be still. Listen.

Like you, the Earth breathes.

Your breath is alive with the promise of flowers.

Each time you blow a kiss to the world, you spread pollen that might grow to be a new plant.

The book is nonetheless grounded in real science. Kelsey notes:

I wrote this book as a celebration — one to honor the extraordinary ways in which all of us simply are nature. Every example in this book is backed by current science. Every day, for instance, you breathe in more than a million pollen grains.

But what makes the project particularly exciting is that, in the face of the devastating gender gap in science education, here is a thoughtful, beautiful piece of early science education presented by two women, the most heartening such example since Lauren Redniss’s Radioactive.

A companion iPad app features sound effects, animation, an original score by Paul Aucoin, behind-the-scenes glimpses of Kim’s process in creating her stunning 3D dioramas, and even build-your-own-diorama adventures.

Originally featured in March — see more here.

3. THE HOLE

The Hole (public library) by artist Øyvind Torseter, one of Norway’s most celebrated illustrators, tells the story of a lovable protagonist who wakes up one day and discovers a mysterious hole in his apartment, which moves and seems to have a mind of its own. Befuddled, he looks for its origin — in vain. He packs it in a box and takes it to a lab, but still no explanation.

With Torseter’s minimalist yet visually eloquent pen-and-digital line drawings, vaguely reminiscent of Sir Quentin Blake and Tomi Ungerer yet decidedly distinctive, the story is at once simple and profound, amusing and philosophical, the sort of quiet meditation that gently, playfully tickles us into existential inquiry.

What makes the book especially magical is that a die-cut hole runs from the wonderfully gritty cardboard cover through every page and all the way out through the back cover — an especial delight for those of us who swoon over masterpieces of die-cut whimsy. In every page, the hole is masterfully incorporated into the visual narrative, adding an element of tactile delight that only an analog book can afford. The screen thus does it little justice, as these digital images feature a mere magenta-rimmed circle where the die-cut hole actually appears, but I’ve tried to capture its charm in a few photographs accompanying the page illustrations.

Originally featured in September, with lots more illustrations.

4. MY BROTHER’S BOOK

For those of us who loved legendary children’s book author Maurice Sendak — famed creator of wild things, little-known illustrator of velveteen rabbits, infinitely warm heart, infinitely witty mind — his death in 2012 was one of the year’s greatest heartaches. Now, half a century after his iconic Where The Wild Things Are, comes My Brother’s Book (public library; UK) — a bittersweet posthumous farewell to the world, illustrated in vibrant, dreamsome watercolors and written in verse inspired by some of Sendak’s lifelong influences: Shakespeare, Blake, Keats, and the music of Mozart. In fact, a foreword by Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt reveals the book is based on the Bard’s “A Winter’s Tale.”

It tells the story of two brothers, Jack and Guy, torn asunder when a falling star crashes onto Earth. Though on the surface about the beloved author’s own brother Jack, who died 18 years ago, the story is also about the love of Sendak’s life and his partner of fifty years, psychoanalyst Eugene Glynn, whose prolonged illness and eventual loss in 2007 devastated Sendak — the character of Guy reads like a poetic fusion of Sendak and Glynn. And while the story might be a universal “love letter to those who have gone before,” as NPR’s Renee Montagne suggests in Morning Edition, it is in equal measure a private love letter to Glynn. (Sendak passed away the day before President Obama announced his support for same-sex marriage, but Sendak fans were quick to honor both historic moments with a bittersweet homage.)

Indeed, the theme of all-consuming love manifests viscerally in Sendak’s books. Playwright Tony Kushner, a longtime close friend of Sendak’s and one of his most heartfelt mourners, tells NPR:

There’s a lot of consuming and devouring and eating in Maurice’s books. And I think that when people play with kids, there’s a lot of fake ferocity and threats of, you know, devouring — because love is so enormous, the only thing you can think of doing is swallowing the person that you love entirely.

My Brother’s Book ends on a soul-stirring note, tender and poignant in its posthumous light:

And Jack slept safe
Enfolded in his brother’s arms
And Guy whispered ‘Good night
And you will dream of me.’

Originally featured in February.

5. DOES MY GOLDFISH KNOW WHO I AM?

In 2012, I wrote about a lovely book titled Big Questions from Little People & Simple Answers from Great Minds, in which some of today’s greatest scientists, writers, and philosophers answer kids’ most urgent questions, deceptively simple yet profound. It went on to become one of the year’s best books and among readers’ favorites. A few months later, Gemma Elwin Harris, the editor who had envisioned the project, reached out to invite me to participate in the book’s 2013 edition by answering one randomly assigned question from a curious child. Naturally, I was thrilled to do it, and honored to be a part of something as heartening as Does My Goldfish Know Who I Am? (public library) — a compendium of primary school children’s funny, poignant, innocent yet insightful questions about science and how life works, answered by such celebrated minds as rockstar physicist Brian Cox, beloved broadcaster and voice-of-nature Sir David Attenborough, legendary linguist Noam Chomsky, science writer extraordinaire Mary Roach, stat-showman Hans Rosling, Beatle Paul McCartney, biologist and Beagle Project director Karen James, and iconic illustrator Sir Quentin Blake. As was the case with last year’s edition, more than half of the proceeds from the book — which features illustrations by the wonderful Andy Smith — are being donated to a children’s charity.

The questions range from what the purpose of science is to why onions make us cry to whether spiders can speak to why we blink when we sneeze. Psychologist and broadcaster Claudia Hammond, who recently explained the fascinating science of why time slows down when we’re afraid, speeds up as we age, and gets all warped while we’re on vacation in one of the best psychology and philosophy books of 2013, answers the most frequently asked question by the surveyed children: Why do we cry?

It’s normal to cry when you feel upset and until the age of twelve boys cry just as often as girls. But when you think about it, it is a bit strange that salty water spills out from the corners of your eyes just because you feel sad.

One professor noticed people often say that, despite their blotchy faces, a good cry makes them feel better. So he did an experiment where people had to breathe in over a blender full of onions that had just been chopped up. Not surprisingly this made their eyes water. He collected the tears and put them in the freezer. Then he got people to sit in front of a very sad film wearing special goggles which had tiny buckets hanging off the bottom, ready to catch their tears if they cried. The people cried, but the buckets didn’t work and in the end he gathered their tears in tiny test tubes instead.

He found that the tears people cried when they were upset contained extra substances, which weren’t in the tears caused by the onions. So he thinks maybe we feel better because we get rid of these substances by crying and that this is the purpose of tears.

But not everyone agrees. Many psychologists think that the reason we cry is to let other people know that we need their sympathy or help. So crying, provided we really mean it, brings comfort because people are nice to us.

Crying when we’re happy is a bit more of a mystery, but strong emotions have a lot in common, whether happy or sad, so they seem to trigger some of the same processes in the body.

(For a deeper dive into the biological mystery of crying, see the science of sobbing and emotional tearing.)

Joshua Foer, who knows a thing or two about superhuman memory and the limits of our mind, explains to 9-year-old Tom how the brain can store so much information despite being that small:

An adult’s brain only weighs about 1.4 kilograms, but it’s made up of about 100 billion microscopic neurons. Each of those neurons looks like a tiny branching tree, whose limbs reach out and touch other neurons. In fact, each neuron can make between 5,000 and 10,000 connections with other neurons — sometimes even more. That’s more than 500 trillion connections! A memory is essentially a pattern of connections between neurons.

Every sensation that you remember, every thought that you think, transforms your brain by altering the connections within that vast network. By the time you get to the end of this sentence, you will have created a new memory, which means your brain will have physically changed.

Neuroscientist Tali Sharot, who has previously studied why our brains are wired for optimism, answers 8-year-old Maia’s question about why we don’t have memories from the time we were babies and toddlers:

We use our brain for memory. In the first few years of our lives, our brain grows and changes a lot, just like the rest of our body. Scientists think that because the parts of our brain that are important for memory have not fully developed when we are babies, we are unable to store memories in the same way that we do when we are older.

Also, when we are very young we do not know how to speak. This makes it difficult to keep events in your mind and remember them later, because we use language to remember what happened in the past.

In answering 8-year-old Hannah’s question about what newspapers do when there is no news, writer and journalist Oliver Burkeman, author of the excellent The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking, offers a primer on media literacy — an important caveat on news that even we, as alleged grown-ups, frequently forget:

Newspapers don’t really go out and find the news: they decide what gets to count as news. The same goes for television and radio. And you might disagree with their decisions! (For example, journalists are often accused of focusing on bad news and ignoring the good, making the world seem worse than it is.)

The important thing to remember, whenever you’re reading or watching the news, is that someone decided to tell you those things, while leaving out other things. They’re presenting one particular view of the world — not the only one. There’s always another side to the story.

And my answer, to 9-year-old Ottilie’s question about why we have books:

Some people might tell you that books are no longer necessary now that we have the internet. Don’t believe them. Books help us know other people, know how the world works, and, in the process, know ourselves more deeply in a way that has nothing to with what you read them on and everything to do with the curiosity, integrity and creative restlessness you bring to them.

Books build bridges to the lives of others, both the characters in them and your countless fellow readers across other lands and other eras, and in doing so elevate you and anchor you more solidly into your own life. They give you a telescope into the minds of others, through which you begin to see with ever greater clarity the starscape of your own mind.

And though the body and form of the book will continue to evolve, its heart and soul never will. Though the telescope might change, the cosmic truths it invites you to peer into remain eternal like the Universe.

In many ways, books are the original internet — each fact, each story, each new bit of information can be a hyperlink to another book, another idea, another gateway into the endlessly whimsical rabbit hole of the written word. Just like the web pages you visit most regularly, your physical bookmarks take you back to those book pages you want to return to again and again, to reabsorb and relive, finding new meaning on each visit — because the landscape of your life is different, new, “reloaded” by the very act of living.

Originally featured in November — read more here.

6. LITTLE BOY BROWN

“I didn’t feel alone in the Lonely Crowd,” young Italo Calvino wrote of his visit to America, and it is frequently argued that hardly any place embodies the “Lonely Crowd” better than New York, city of “avoid-eye-contact indifference of the crowded subways.” That, perhaps, is what children’s book writer Isobel Harris set out to both affirm and decondition in Little Boy Brown (public library) — a magnificent ode to childhood and loneliness, easily the greatest ode to childhood and loneliness ever written, illustrated by the famed Hungarian-born French cartoonist and graphic designer André François. Originally published in 1949, this timeless story that stirred the hearts of generations has been newly resurrected by Enchanted Lion.

This is the story of a four-year-old boy living with his well-to-do mother and father in a Manhattan hotel, in which the elevator connects straight to the subway tunnel below the building and plugs right into the heart of the city. And yet Little Boy Brown, whose sole friends are the doormen and elevator operators, feels woefully lonely — until, one day, his hotel chambermaid Hilda invites him to visit her house outside the city, where he blossoms into a new sense of belonging.

Underpinning the charming tale of innocence and children’s inborn benevolence is a heartwarming message about connection across the lines of social class and bridging the gaps of privilege with simple human kindness.

Hilda’s mother kissed me before she even knew who I was!

[…]

Hilda’s family is smarter than we are. They can all speak two different languages, and they can close their eyes and think about two different countries. They’ve been on the Ocean, and they’ve climbed high mountains. They haven’t got quite enough of anything. It makes it exciting when a little more comes!

The story itself, at once a romantic time-capsule of a bygone New York and a timeless meditation on what it’s like feel so lonesome in a crowd of millions, invites us to explore the tender intersection of loneliness and loveliness. François, who studied with Picasso, illustrated a number of iconic New Yorker covers, and belongs to the same coterie of influential mid-century creative legends as Sir Quentin Blake, Tomi Ungerer, and his close friend and collaborator of Ronald Searle, brings all this wonderful dimensionality to life in his singular illustrations, all the more special given that this was his first children’s book.

Originally featured in November — see more here.

7. THE MIGHTY LALOUCHE

The more you win, the more you win, the science of the “winner effect” tells us. The same interplay of biochemistry, psychology and performance thus also holds true of the opposite — but perhaps this is why we love a good underdog story, those unlikely tales of assumed “losers” beating the odds to triumph as “winners.” Stories like this are fundamental to our cultural mythology of ambition and anything-is-possible aspiration, and they speak most powerfully to our young and hopeful selves, to our inner underdogs, to the child who dreams of defeating her bully in blazing glory.

That ever-alluring parable is at the heart of The Mighty Lalouche (public library), written by Matthew Olshan, who famously reimagined Twain’s Huckleberry Finn with an all-girl cast of characters, and illustrated by the inimitable Sophie Blackall, one of the most extraordinary book artists working today, who has previously given us such gems as her drawings of Craigslist missed connections and Aldous Huxley’s only children’s book. It tells the heartening story of a humble and lithe early-twentieth-century French postman named Lalouche, his profound affection for his pet finch Geneviève, and his surprising success in the era’s favorite sport of la boxe française, or French boxing.

One day, at the height of Parisians’ infatuation with the novelty of electric cars, Lalouche’s boss at the post office informs him that a new electric autocar is replacing all walking postmen, who are too slow by comparison. Desperate to provide for himself and Geneviève, Lalouche sees a flyer offering cash to any sparring partners willing to fight the champions at the Bastille Boxing Club. Though Lalouche is small and “rather bony,” his hands are nimble and strong from handling weighty packages, and his feet are fast from racing up apartment stairs in his deliveries — so he signs up.

One should never underestimate a man who loves his finch.

Thanks to his agility and love for the birdie, to everyone’s astonishment, he goes on to defeat each of the champions in turn — even the formidable Anaconda, “the biggest, baddest beast the city has ever seen,” infamous for his deadly sleeper hold. But when the postal service chief realizes the autocar is just a gimmick good for nothing and asks whether Lalouche is willing to take his job back, the tiny champ gladly agrees, for his heart is in the joy he brings people as their mail arrives.

Underpinning the simple allegory of unlikely triumph is a deeper reflection on our present-day anxieties about whether or not machines — gadgets, robots, algorithms — will replace us. The story gently assuring us that the most quintessential of human qualities and capacities — courage, integrity, love — will always remain ours and ours alone.

But what makes the book particularly exceptional are the curious archival images uncovered in the research, presented here exclusively alongside the soulful and expressive illustrations Blackall reincarnated them into:

Boxer trading cards, 1895

Boxer pose II, early 1900s

Three boxers, early 1900s

Originally featured n May — see more here.

8. GOBBLE YOU UP

For nearly two decades, independent India-based publisher Tara Books has been giving voice to marginalized art and literature through a collective of artists, writers, and designers collaborating on beautiful books based on regional folk traditions, producing such gems as Waterlife, The Night Life of Trees, and Drawing from the City. A year after I Saw a Peacock with a Fiery Tail — one of the best art books of 2012, a magnificent 17th-century British “trick” poem adapted in a die-cut narrative and illustrated in the signature Indian folk art style of the Gond tribe — comes Gobble You Up (public library), an oral Rajasthani trickster tale adapted as a cumulative rhyme in a mesmerizing handmade treasure released in a limited edition of 7,000 numbered handmade copies, illustrated by artist Sunita and silkscreened by hand in two colors on beautifully coarse kraft paper custom-made for the project. What makes it especially extraordinary, however, is that the Mandna tradition of tribal finger-painting — an ancient Indian art form practiced only by women and passed down from mother to daughter across the generations, created by soaking pieces of cloth in chalk and lime paste, which the artist squeezes through her fingers into delicate lines on the mud walls of village huts — has never before been used to tell a children’s story.

And what a story it is: A cunning jackal who decides to spare himself the effort of hunting for food by tricking his fellow forest creatures into being gobbled up whole, beginning with his friend the crane; he slyly swallows them one by one, until the whole menagerie fills his belly — a play on the classic Meena motif of the pregnant animal depicted with a baby inside its belly, reflecting the mother-daughter genesis of the ancient art tradition itself.

Indeed, Sunita herself was taught to paint by her mother and older sister — but unlike most Meena women, who don’t usually leave the confines of their village and thus contain their art within their community, Sunita has thankfully ventured into the wider world, offering us a portal into this age-old wonderland of art and storytelling.

Gita Wolf, Tara’s visionary founder, who envisioned the project and wrote the cumulative rhyme, describes the challenges of adapting this ephemeral, living art form onto the printed page without losing any of its expressive aliveness:

Illustrating the story in the Meena style of art involved two kinds of movement. The first was to build a visual narrative sequencing from a tradition which favored single, static images. The second challenge was to keep the quality of the wall art, while transferring it to a different, while also smaller, surface. We decided on using large sheets of brown paper, with Sunita squeezing diluted white acrylic paint through her fingers.

Originally featured in October — see more here.

9. BALLAD

The best, most enchanting stories live somewhere between the creative nourishment of our daydreams and the dark allure of our nightmares. That’s exactly where beloved French graphic artist Blexbolex transports us in Ballad (public library) — his exquisite and enthralling follow-up to People, one of the best illustrated books of 2011, and Seasons.

This continuously evolving story traces a child’s perception of his surroundings as he walks home from school. It unfolds over seven sequences across 280 glorious pages and has an almost mathematical beauty to it as each sequence exponentially blossoms into the next: We begin with school, path, and home; we progress to school, street, path, forest, home; before we know it, there’s a witch, a stranger, a sorcerer, a hot air balloon, and a kidnapped queen. All throughout, we’re invited to reimagine the narrative as we absorb the growing complexity of the world — a beautiful allegory for our walk through life itself.

The frontispiece makes a simple and alluring promise:

It’s a story as old as the world — a story that begins all over again each day.

The dark whimsy of Blexbolex’s unusual visual storytelling sings to us a ballad of danger and delight, serenading with the enchantment of fairy tales, the starkness of graphic novels, and the liberation of choose-your-own-adventure stories. And this is precisely where Blexbolex’s singular talent springs to life: Trained as a painter in the 1980s but having left art school to find himself as a silk-screen artist, he blends the charisma of vintage graphic design and traditional printing techniques with the dynamic mesmerism of contemporary graphic novels and experimental narratives to create an entirely new, wholly different form of bewitching visual storytelling, where a few carefully chosen words invite perpetual reinterpretation of layered and expressive scenes.

Originally featured in October — see more here.

10. THE DARK

Daniel Handler — beloved author, timelessly heartening literary jukeboxer — is perhaps better-known by his pen name Lemony Snicket, under which he pens his endlessly delightful children’s books. In fact, they owe much of their charisma to the remarkable creative collaborations Snicket spawns, from 13 Words illustrated by the inimitable Maira Kalman to Who Could It Be At This Hour? with artwork by celebrated cartoonist Seth. Snicket’s 2013 gem, reminiscent in spirit of Maya Angelou’s Life Doesn’t Frighten Me, is at least as exciting — a minimalist yet magnificently expressive story about a universal childhood fear, titled The Dark (public library) and illustrated by none other than Jon Klassen.

In a conversation with NPR, Handler echoes Aung San Suu Kyi’s timeless wisdom on freedom from fear and articulates the deeper, more universal essence of the book’s message:

I think books that are meant to be read in the nighttime ought to confront the very fears that we’re trying to think about. And I think that a young reader of The Dark will encounter a story about a boy who makes new peace with a fear, rather than a story that ignores whatever troubles are lurking in the corners of our minds when we go to sleep.

Originally featured in June.

11. JANE, THE FOX AND ME

“Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it’s a way to make contact with reality,” Nora Ephron wrote. “If I can’t stand the world I just curl up with a book, and it’s like a little spaceship that takes me away from everything,” Susan Sontag told an interviewer, articulating an experience at once so common and so deeply personal to all of us who have ever taken refuge from the world in the pages of a book and the words of a beloved author. It’s precisely this experience that comes vibrantly alive in Jane, the Fox, and Me (public library) — a stunningly illustrated graphic novel about a young girl named Hélène, who, cruelly teased by the “mean girls” clique at school, finds refuge in Charlotte Brönte’s Jane Eyre. In Jane, she sees both a kindred spirit and aspirational substance of character, one straddling the boundary between vulnerability and strength with remarkable grace — just the quality of heart and mind she needs as she confronts the common and heartbreaking trials of teenage girls tormented by bullying, by concerns over their emerging womanly shape, and by the soul-shattering feeling of longing for acceptance yet receiving none.

Written by Fanny Britt and illustrated by Isabelle Arsenault — the artist behind the magnificent Virginia Wolf, one of the best children’s books of 2012 — this masterpiece of storytelling is as emotionally honest and psychologically insightful as it is graphically stunning. What makes the visual narrative especially enchanting is that Hélène’s black-and-white world of daily sorrow springs to life in full color whenever she escapes with Brönte.

Originally featured in November — see more here.

12. MY FIRST KAFKA

Sylvia Plath believed it was never too early to dip children’s toes in the vast body of literature. But to plunge straight into Kafka? Why not, which is precisely what Brooklyn-based writer and videogame designer Matthue Roth has done in My First Kafka: Runaways, Rodents, and Giant Bugs (public library) — a magnificent adaptation of Kafka for kids. With stunning black-and-white illustrations by London-based fine artist Rohan Daniel Eason, this gem falls — rises, rather — somewhere between Edward Gorey, Maurice Sendak, and the Graphic Canon series.

The idea came to Roth after he accidentally started reading Kafka to his two little girls, who grew enchanted with the stories. As for the choice to adapt Kafka’s characteristically dark sensibility for children, Roth clearly subscribes to the Sendakian belief that grown-ups project their own fears onto kids, who welcome rather than dread the dark. Indeed, it’s hard not to see Sendak’s fatherly echo in Eason’s beautifully haunting black-and-white drawings.

Much like Jonathan Safran Foer used Street of Crocodiles to create his brilliant Tree of Codes literary remix and Darwin’s great-granddaughter adapted the legendary naturalist’s biography into verse, Roth scoured public domain texts and various translations of Kafka to find the perfect works for his singsong transformations: the short prose poem “Excursion into the Mountains,” the novella “The Metamorphosis,” which endures as Kafka’s best-known masterpiece, and “Josefine the Singer,” his final story.

“I don’t know!”
I cried without being heard.

“I do not know.”

If nobody comes,
then nobody comes.

I’ve done nobody any harm.
Nobody’s done me any harm.
But nobody will help me.

A pack of nobodies
would be rather fine,
on the other hand.

I’d love to go on a trip — why not? –
with a pack of nobodies.

Into the mountains, of course.
Where else?

In a way, the book — like most of Kafka’s writing — also bears the odd mesmerism of literary history’s letters and diaries, the semi-forbidden pleasure of which swells under the awareness that their writers never meant for us to read the very words we’re reading, never sought to invite us into their private worlds. Kafka wished for his entire world to remain private — he never finished any of his novels and burned the majority of his manuscripts; the rest he left with his closest friend and literary executor, Max Brod, whom he instructed to burn the remaining diaries, sketches, manuscripts, and letters. It was out of love that Brod chose not to, possibly displeasing his friend but eternally pleasing the literary public.

Originally featured in July — see more here.

13. MY FATHER’S ARMS ARE A BOAT

The finest children’s books have a way of exploring complex, universal themes through elegant simplicity and breathless beauty. From my friends at Enchanted Lion, collaborators on Mark Twain’s Advice to Little Girls and makers of some of the most extraordinary picture-books you’ll ever encounter, comes My Father’s Arms Are a Boat (public library) by writer Stein Erik Lunde and illustrator Øyvind Torseter. This tender and heartening Norwegian gem tells the story of an anxious young boy who climbs into his father’s arms seeking comfort on a cold sleepless night. The two step outside into the winter wonderland as the boy asks questions about the red birds in the spruce tree to be cut down the next morning, about the fox out hunting, about why his mother will never wake up again. With his warm and assuring answers, the father watches his son make sense of this strange world of ours where love and loss go hand in hand.

Lunde, who also writes lyrics and has translated Bob Dylan into Norwegian, is a masterful storyteller who unfolds incredible richness in few words. Meanwhile, Torseter’s exquisite 2D/3D style combining illustration and paper sculpture, reminiscent of Soyeon Kim’s wonderful You Are Stardust, envelops the story in a sheath of delicate whimsy.

Above all, My Father’s Arms Are a Boat is about the quiet way in which boundless love and unconditional assurance can lift even the most pensive of spirits from the sinkhole of existential anxiety.

Originally featured in April.

HONORABLE MENTIONS

Go: A Kidd’s Guide to Graphic Design by legendary graphic designer Chip Kidd, Night Light by New York Times art director and illustrator Nicholas Blechman, and Mr. Tiger Goes Wild by Caldecott Honor artist Peter Brown.

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I’m guessing if you’re reading this blog, you’re probably fond of books.

By a strange coincidence, so am I.

When I was a kid, my mom read to me all the time. Books I’m guessing most of you have never heard of: Socks for Supper, Little Runner of the Longhouse, and Humbug Witch….

(You envy my circa 1970 orange kitchen countertop.) 

These books are indescribably precious to me. I’m sure you understand why.

She also read me books you probably *have* heard of: Emmet Otter’s Jugband Christmas, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, & Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good Very Bad Day….

We also went to the library. We went to the library alot.

Sarah and I read to Oot all the time. And while I actively encourage people *not* to buy him toys, (because he has enough toys.) I never, ever mind when someone brings him a book. Because it is scientifically impossible to have enough books.

(These are just the *upstairs* bookshelves.)

I’m guessing many of you grew up in bookish households too. Because that’s how it works. If you grow up with books, you learn to love books….

And if you don’t grow up with books…. Well….

Here’s the thing. Do you know that there are kids that don’t have any books? No books at all?

If someone had bounced this idea off me as a kid, I wouldn’t have even understood it. How could you have no books? Books were a given. They were like gravity and air. You couldn’t *not* have books.

But I never had to grapple with this idea as a kid. I was lucky.

I was already an adult when I learned some of the statistics. I learned that in middle-class homes there are an average of 13 books for every kid. (A number that still seems freakishly low to me.)

But in some of the poorest parts of this country, there can be, on average, only one book for every three hundred children.

I couldn’t have understood this as a kid, and as an adult it’s hard for me to get my mind around. Honestly, I can’t process it in any rational way, and every time I try, I find myself getting terribly, terribly fucking angry.

So I’m going to do something stupid. Despite the fact that I’m currently running my own charity’s fundraiser right now, I’m going to talk to you about a different charity.

I’m going to talk to you about First Book.

Here’s the simple version: First Book is an organization looking to fix this problem. They give books to kids who don’t have any.

Think about that. Some kids have never owned a book.

You see, First Book works with schools and libraries and publishers to–

Hmmm… Let’s see if I can find a video that will explain this….

Watch that. Seriously. It’s not even two minutes long. You have the time.

Keep in mind that that that video is six years old. Since then, First Book has distributed more than 100 million books to schools, libraries, and families.

First Book is responsible for putting books in the hands of millions of kids. For some of these kids, it’s the first book they have ever owned. For some it’s the first book they have ever held.

There are two reasons I’m mentioning this today.

1. Last week, I got an e-mail from First Book. They’re running a promotion where every donation is being tripled because of a partnership with Random House Children’s Books.

2. Right now, we’re selling a charity calendar with photographer Lauren Zurchen.

(Click to Embiggen.)

I’ve already mentioned this. But the part that bears repeating is that all the proceeds from the calendar are going to be split between Worldbuilders and First Book. 

So here’s the deal, if you buy this calendar before Dec 31st (Which is the best time to buy a calendar, really.) We’ll donate the money to First Book before the deadline, so it will count triple.

And you know what else? Because I’m all weepy right now from watching a bunch of those First Book videos, and because the thought of kids growing up without books makes me want to rage quit the entire earth, I’m going to do something extra:

For every one of Lauren’s calendars someone buys between now and Dec 31st. I’m going to donate $5 out of my own pocket to First Book.

(I couldn’t find a $5 bill here in the house.)

So *that* donation is going to be tripled as well.

And you know what else? I’ll do the same thing for the Heifer International Calendar we’re selling in The Tinker’s Packs. I’ll even do it if you’re buying them in the combo packs we have set up so you can buy more than one and get a price break.

You’re all geeks, you can do the math. After my matching donation gets added to the proceeds from the calendar, then it gets tripled by Random House, that  means for every one of these calendars someone buys, First Book will be giving out around 10 books to kids who desperately need them.

Think of how much you loved reading books when you were a kid. Now think of that times ten.

And you know, you also get a cool calendar filled with pictures of fantasy authors being awesome.

And money will go to Worldbuilders, too.

There’s really no downside here.

*     *     *

Since I’m hoping some of you will be visiting the Tinker’s Packs Soon, I’d like to direct you to something new that *just* showed up. Something I wasn’t sure we were going to be able to offer this year….

• Chocolate Frogs from the Harry Potter Alliance.

Earlier this year, I teamed up with the Harry Potter Alliance to add a collection of blogs and articles I’d written to their annual fundraiser.

In return, they’ve let us carry their awesome Chocolate Frogs in The Tinker’s Packs.

The mission of the Harry Potter Alliance is to raise awareness about social injustice and hopefully bring it to an end. Their Chocolate Frogs are part of that mission. You see, the company that produces the officially licensed Frogs refuses to release the source of their cocoa. This is a big deal, given that cocoa is one of the most corrupt agricultural crops in the world, where a huge portion of the world’s harvest uses some really horrific child labor.

If you want the details about the HPA’s Chocolate Frog campaign, take a look over here.

When the company producing the frogs refused to disclose where their cocoa comes from, the HPA decided to make their own Chocolate Frogs from Fair Trade chocolate. They wanted to show it was possible, and that people would prefer to buy a product that’s ethically produced, even if it costs a little more.

We think the same thing. So we’re selling some in The Tinker’s Packs. They make great stocking stuffers, so you can head on over and grab some in either Milk or Dark Chocolate. Each box comes with a Wizard Card and a nice warm fuzzy that you’ve done something awesome today.

We’ve only got 300 of these, so you might want to move fast. We’ve been selling out of things really quickly this year….

And lastly, an auction.

• Auction: Stanchion’s earring in 14k gold.
  

Folks who have followed the blog for a while know the only gold Talent Pipes in this world are the ones I give out to people. People who have helped me beta read my books, improved my life, or just generally been awesome in ways I appreciate.

In the Four Corners, the only people who have gold pipes are Deoch and Stanchion, because they own the Eolian and they’re slightly smug about that fact.

Stanchion wears his as an earring, and this year, Badali Jewelry offered to make a single replica of Stanchion’s earring in 14 karat gold for us to auction off.

It’s the only one in existence, and you can bid on it over here.

Also, since we’re talking about Badali, I’ll mention that for the duration of the fundraiser, they’re donating 10% of sales to Worldbuilders if you use a special coupon code.

The code is good on anything in their store, AND they’ll give you a deal on shipping too.

If you want to do some holiday shopping for the geek in your life, odds are you’ll find a lot to suit you over on their website. Especially since they hold the licenses for The Hobbit, the Lord of the Rings, The Wheel of Time, Mistborn, and a bunch of my stuff, too.

• US Customers – WBLDUSA13

US customers get free USPS Priority Shipping and 10% of your order will be donated to Worldbuilders.

• International Customers – WBLDINT13

International orders get $10.00 off shipping and 10% of your order will be donated to Worldbuilders.

*     *     *

Want to learn more about Worldbuilders? You can check out our shiny new website here. Or you can get all the details about this year’s fundraiser on my blog.

Thanks for tuning in folks, and thanks for helping to spread the word….

pat

Ben Brody presents “the definitive glossary of modern US military slang,” noting that well-known terms like “chopper” and “GI” are out of date. Brody writes that “soldiers fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have developed an expansive new military vocabulary, taking elements from popular culture as well as the doublespeak of the military industrial complex.” Some examples:

Bird: Helicopter. “Chopper” is rarely used, except in movies, where it is always used. A chopper is a kind of motorcycle, not an aircraft.

FAN: Feet, Ass and Nuts. Used to describe a smell common to military tents and barracks.

Groundhog Day: From the Bill Murray movie, the phrase is used to describe deployments where every day proceeds the same way, no matter how the individual tries to change it.

Gun: A mortar tube or artillery piece. Never used to refer to a rifle or pistol. Military-issued pistols are usually called 9-mils.

Kinetic: Violent. Example: The Pech Valley is one of the most kinetic areas in Afghanistan.

Meat Eater: Usually refers to Special Forces soldiers whose mission focuses on violence, as opposed to those whose mission focuses on stability and training.

Moon Dust: The powdery, flour-like dust that covers everything in southern Afghanistan and much of Iraq.

Self-Licking Ice Cream Cone: A military doctrine or political process that appears to exist in order to justify its own existence, often producing irrelevant indicators of its own success. For example, continually releasing figures on the amount of Taliban weapons seized, as if there were a finite supply of such weapons. While seizing the weapons, soldiers raid Afghan villages, enraging the residents and legitimizing the Taliban’s cause.

From Freestyle: The Art of the Rhyme, a short clip of a 17-year-old Christopher Wallace (aka Biggie Smalls, aka The Notorious B.I.G.) freestyle rapping on a street corner in Bed Stuy, Brooklyn in 1989.

It's all there...the talent, the confidence, the skills. Compare with a 17-year-old LL Cool J rapping in a Maine gymnasium in 1985. (via ★interesting)

Update: Biggie was rapping on Bedford Ave between Quincy St and Lexington Ave in Bed-Stuy. Check it out on Google Maps. (thx, debbie)

19 November 1957

Dear Monsieur Germain,

I let the commotion around me these days subside a bit before speaking to you from the bottom of my heart. I have just been given far too great an honour, one I neither sought nor solicited.

But when I heard the news, my first thought, after my mother, was of you. Without you, without the affectionate hand you extended to the small poor child that I was, without your teaching and example, none of all this would have happened.

I don't make too much of this sort of honour. But at least it gives me the opportunity to tell you what you have been and still are for me, and to assure you that your efforts, your work, and the generous heart you put into it still live in one of your little schoolboys who, despite the years, has never stopped being your grateful pupil. I embrace you with all my heart.

Albert Camus

Readers — This is an excerpt from an article in the family issue of Real Simple that’s on the stands now.  Read the whole piece here.

Help for Overprotective Parents by Jennifer Breheny Wallace

A couple of years ago, my then five-year-old son William took a standardized test in which he was asked about everyday objects. The tester noted his unusual responses to some questions. When asked “What do candy and ice cream have in common?” William replied, “They both give you cavities.” For the question “What is chewing gum?” William answered, “A choking hazard.”

I was raised by risk-averse parents, and they were raised by risk-averse parents, and now I find myself raising risk-averse children. It’s an emotional family heirloom—but even my parents think I’ve taken it too far. They have two smoke alarms; I have 10. They worry about sunburn; I worry about skin cancer. And how well does sunscreen really work, and why can’t the kids just wear full-protection hazmat suits?

William, now seven, is my oldest; his sister and younger brother are six and three. Last year William and I had an exhausting summer as we struggled between his desire to grow up and my desire to keep him safe, which basically means locked in our house: no playing on the front lawn, no crossing our busy street, no swimming in the ocean. This year I vowed to break free. I was tired of saying no all the time, and I knew that as William grew older, he would only want to become more independent. But I knew I couldn’t get there alone—I needed a copilot who could stop my anxious mind from spinning. So I called Lenore Skenazy.

Lenore is the author of Free-Range Kids: How to Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Children Without Going Nuts With Worry, ($12, amazon.com) and she is my polar opposite. In 2008 she let her nine-year-old son ride the New York City subway alone and wrote a column about it for the New York Sun. After national media picked up the story, Lenore was dubbed America’s Worst Mom, so she founded Free-Range Kids, a grassroots movement to give children more autonomy. According to Lenore, hyper-protective parents like me are not only driving ourselves crazy but also depriving our kids of the satisfaction that comes with mastery and self-sufficiency. She even makes “Free-Range house calls,” in which she visits nervous parents to help them see how competent their kids can be.

I was ready to change, but I couldn’t resist asking Lenore, “Isn’t there a safe way to teach children to take risks?”

“Of course,” she said. “I’m a big fan of safety measures—bike helmets, seat belts. I just don’t think kids need a security detail every time they leave the house. Risk and risky are not the same thing, but our culture is determined not to see the difference.” Whenever a child gets on a bike, he’s taking a risk, Lenore told me, because he could fall and break an arm. (I resisted the urge to hang up.) Riding a bike at night without reflectors, however, is risky. “You can limit risky behavior, but you can’t eliminate risk,” she said. “If a child never tries gum, he’ll never choke on it. But he could choke on a bologna sandwich.” I had to admit she had a point.

Read what happened next!

A Cornell computer scientist and a Facebook engineer have developed an algorithm (pdf) they claim “can identify one’s spouse or romantic partner — and even if a relationship is likely to break up”:

Their key finding was that the total number of mutual friends two people share — embeddedness, in social networking terms — is actually a fairly weak indicator of romantic relationships. Far better, they found, was a network measure that they call dispersion. This yardstick measures mutual friends, but also friends from the further-flung reaches of a person’s network neighborhood. High dispersion occurs when a couple’s mutual friends are not well connected to one another.

Adrianne Jeffries explains further:

The researchers were able to identify who was dating whom with 60 percent accuracy, much better than the 2 percent accuracy they’d get from random guessing. High dispersion also seems to be correlated with longer relationships. The study found that couples were 50 percent more likely to break up in the next two months if the dispersion algorithm failed to guess that they were dating.

The scientists also looked at metrics such as how many times a user viewed another’s profile, attendance at the same events, and messages sent. Dispersion turned out to be the most overall accurate metric for determining romantic relationships. The researchers used multiple sets of anonymous data, including a large data set from 1.3 million Facebook users.

Before the 20th century, there is little historical record of a link between Halloween and witchcraft. The relatively recent association appears to be American:

It is no surprise, perhaps, that part of the answer lies with the rise of modern marketing and branding. How does one dress up as a witch for Halloween, as many thousands will be doing this 31 October? Basically you stick a black pointy hat on your head. Depictions of witches with pointy hats began to appear in children’s books in eighteenth-century England, probably inspired by earlier black steeple hats worn in stereotypic depictions of seventeenth-century Puritans. By the end of the nineteenth century the pointy-hatted witch had become a widespread image in print. It was at this moment that Salem, Massachusetts, comes into the picture. It was there that a jeweller named Daniel Low began to produce souvenir spoons depicting a witch with a pointy hat and broom. Their success kick-started the transformation of Salem into the marketing creation ‘Witch City’, and the pointy-hatted witch was replicated on numerous ‘Witch City’ products.

At the same time as this witch image was proliferating in marketing and the mass media, the nature of American Halloween custom was changing. With its roots in Irish mischief night, American youths had traditionally marked Halloween by performing such malicious acts as greasing railway tracks, smashing windows, and overturning outdoor toilets. But from the 1950s onwards the sanitised American trick-or-treat and costume bonanza we know today was beginning to spread. The remarketing of Witch City into Halloween City by local entrepreneurs from the 1980s onwards was a significant element in this transformation. “It’s America’s biggest Halloween party and you’re invited!” one promotional site proclaims today. The now inseparable link between witchcraft and Halloween was forged.

Culminating in this amazing awful scene in The Worst Witch (which you can watch in full here):

Martin Schneider shivers at the classic Halloween hathos:

Tim Curry is always inescapably Tim Curry, and in this context that’s a positive boon—he may be the only element in this brief clip that’s even halfway up to snuff. Never have I seen so many superfluous and chintzy video effects deployed in such a short span of time—innumerable green-screen effects, several completely crazy swirl transitions, who knows what the hell else. It’s truly a phantasmagoria of 80s cheese.

(Image: “Hallowe’en precautions” postcard, c. 1910, via NYPL Digital Gallery)

Unprecedented look at the ever-enchanting Red Planet, at once more palpable and more mysterious than ever.

“Whether or not there is life on Mars now, there WILL be by the end of this century,” Arthur C. Clarke predicted in 1971 while contemplating humanity’s quest to conquer the Red Planet. “Whatever the reason you’re on Mars is, I’m glad you’re there. And I wish I was with you,” Carl Sagan said a quarter century later in his bittersweet message to future Mars explorers shortly before his death. Sagan, of course, has always been with us — especially as we fulfill, at least partially, Clarke’s prophecy: On March 10, 2006, we put a proxy of human life on, or at least very near, Mars — NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, with its powerful HiRISE telescope, arrived in the Red Planet’s orbit and began mapping its surface in unprecedented detail.

This Is Mars (public library) — a lavish visual atlas by French photographer, graphic designer and editor Xavier Barral, featuring 150 glorious ultra-high-resolution black-and-white images culled from the 30,000 photographs taken by NASA’s MRO, alongside essays by HiRISE telescope principal researcher Alfred S. McEwen, astrophysicist Francis Rocard, and geophysicist Nicolas Mangold — offers an unparalleled glimpse of those mesmerizing visions of otherworldly landscapes beamed back by the MRO in all their romantic granularity, making the ever-enthralling Red Planet feel at once more palpable and more mysterious than ever. At the intersection of art and science, these mesmerizing images belong somewhere between Berenice Abbot’s vintage science photography, the most enchanting aerial photography of Earth, and the NASA Art Project.

In a sentiment of beautiful symmetry to Eudora Welty’s meditation on place and fiction, Barral considers how these images simultaneously anchor us to a physical place and invite us into an ever-unfolding fantasy:

At the end of this voyage, I have gathered here the most endemic landscapes. They send us back to Earth, to the genesis of geological forms, and, at the same time, they upend our reference points: dunes that are made of black sand, ice that sublimates. These places and reliefs can be read as a series of hieroglyphs that take us back to our origins.

For a profound appreciation of how far we’ve come, complement This Is Mars with these beautiful black-and-white photos of vintage NASA training facilities and Carl Sagan, Arthur C. Clarke, and Ray Bradbury’s now-legendary 1971 conversation on Mars and the human mind.

Images courtesy of Aperture

Donating = Loving

Bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings takes hundreds of hours each month. If you find any joy and stimulation here, please consider becoming a Supporting Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner:

♥ $7 / month♥ $3 / month♥ $10 / month♥ $25 / month

You can also become a one-time patron with a single donation in any amount:

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.

Brain Pickings takes 450+ hours a month to curate and edit across the different platforms, and remains banner-free. If it brings you any joy and inspiration, please consider a modest donation – it lets me know I'm doing something right.

The Legend of Zelda is aptly named, as the series has truly become a legend within the gaming industry. Every new generation of gamers have been given the opportunity to fall in love with it through their current Nintendo console. Or if they’re purists, going back to the original NES game. However, the fundamentals have pretty much always remained – a boy in green whose quest is to stop an evil wizard and save the princess. You don’t mess with perfection.

The question is- where did the inspiration for the Legend of Zelda come from? What inspired Nintendo to create a series that would subsequently exhilarate millions of gamers worldwide, many of whom would engage in a lifelong love affair with the franchise? This may sound familiar, but it really did all start with a young boy…

His name was Shigeru Miyamoto, and if you’re a seasoned gaming fan you more than likely recognize the name. If not, he’s the guy responsible for a couple of small indie franchises you’ve probably never heard of- Super Mario Bros, Donkey Kong, F-Zero and Star Fox… Yep, one guy. It’s not surprising from this that he’s known as the “father of modern gaming”. He is also responsible for one of my favourite quotes of all time

Video games are bad for you? That’s what they said about rock and roll.

In addition to the aforementioned series that he has under his belt, Miyamoto is also the principal creator of the Legend of Zelda. And I wasn’t joking when I said that his journey towards one of the greatest series of all time began when he was a boy.

Miyamoto himself has stated that his primary inspiration for the character and the game flow was derived from his explorations of the hillsides surrounding his childhood town of Sonobe, Japan. Much like Link himself, Miyamoto would adventure through the forests, caves, lakes and small villages. As he said,

When I was a child, I went hiking and found a lake. It was quite a surprise for me to stumble upon it. When I traveled around the country without a map, trying to find my way, stumbling on amazing things as I went, I realized how it felt to go on an adventure like this.

Yet another memorable moment of adventure for Miyamoto was when he discovered a cave entrance and explored its interior with the aid of a single lantern. There presumably wasn’t an old man inside handing out wooden swords.

As for the titular name, it was derived from none other than the great Zelda Fitzgerald. For those of you unfamiliar, she was the extremely free-spirited and highly publicized (in her day) wife of literary legend F. Scott Fitzgerald, creator of The Great Gatsby, among a myriad of other works.

So why did Miyamoto choose this name for his princess? Apparently he thought it sounded “pleasant” and “significant.” He certainly wasn’t wrong about the latter.

But what about Link? Well, his depiction was inspired by Peter Pan – the other green clad boy that never seems to grow up. Miyamoto said he wanted his protagonist to be recognizable. And what better way to do that than to use a similar depiction to arguably the most well-known boy in children’s entertainment?

As for the name, that came from the series taking place in the past, present and future, with the main character being the “link” between them.

So there you have it, it started with an adventuresome boy who loved exploring, who then became a man who created a game about a boy who in the process of exploring has adventures.  Seems to have worked out.  To date, depending on what source you want to go with, the Zelda franchise has sold somewhere between 70-80 million copies of the various games in the franchise.

If you liked this article, you might also enjoy:

• How the Gun on the Original Duck Hunt Game Worked
• How Nintendo, Lego, Adidas and 17 other Major Companies Got Their Names
• The Surprisingly Long History of Nintendo
• When Pinball was Illegal
• The Development of the Video Game “Pong” was a Training Exercise for a New Gaming Developer at Atari and Wasn’t Originally Intended to Be Released

Bonus Facts:

• Zelda Fitzgerald was quite the remarkable women in her own right. She herself was a novelist, dubbed “the first flapper”. Her father’s position as the Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court protected her somewhat, but also got her into the news quite a bit when she was young for her “unladylike” antics, such as wearing a skin-tight flesh coloured bathing suit so it would be reported that she swam in the nude.  As a sort of a snapshot into her philosophy on life, it was essentially “girls just wanna have fun”, but literally, according to her high-school graduation photo, was: “Why should all life be work, when we all can borrow. Let’s think only of today, and not worry about tomorrow.”  That was pretty much her life in a nutshell, only she never really needed to do the borrowing part.
• As an adult, Zelda was once asked for her favorite recipe to cook to add to Harper & Brothers Favorite Recipes of Famous Women.  Not being the domestic type, she responded with: “See if there is any bacon, and if there is, ask the cook which pan to fry it in. Then ask if there are any eggs, and if so try and persuade the cook to poach two of them. It is better not to attempt toast, as it burns very easily. Also, in the case of bacon, do not turn the fire too high, or you will have to get out of the house for a week. Serve preferably on china plates, though gold or wood will do if handy.”
• Zelda wasn’t originally too keen on marrying F. Scott Fitzgerald, as she didn’t like his prospects, so she continued allowing others to court her while he went to seek his fortunes as a writer.  F. Scott, however, was enamored with her and was driven to succeed quickly before she accepted someone else’ proposal for marriage.  Towards this end, besides his article writing, he began working on his first book, This Side of Paradise . After it was accepted to be published, F. Scott wrote the publisher stating that he would like the book to be published as quickly as possible as “I have so many things dependent on its success—including of course a girl.”  It worked; after he sent a message to Zelda telling her that he had a book about to be published, she immediately accepted his proposal for marriage and moved to New York to live with him.
• Back to the gaming world, in the original game, the maps spell out ‘Zelda’.
• There is a song hidden in Link’s Awakening and if you wait inside Richard’s Villa for two and a half minutes you’ll hear it. This was trademark move for composer Kuzumi Totaka who has done the same with Luigi’s Mansion, Animal Crossing and other games that he’s worked on.
• There are two Zelda games from the late 90s that many fans are unlikely to have ever played. This is because they were only released as Broadcast Satellite games over a short period of time. Their titles were The Legend of Zelda: The Ancient Stone Tablets and The Legend of Zelda: Triforce of the Gods. The good news is that there are apparently pirated roms for these two games in existence. Not that I would ever encourage that kind of thing…
• Before signing on with Nintendo, Miyamoto had originally intended to become a manga artist.
• In the early going, the brass at Nintendo weren’t too happy with the approach for the gameplay of Zelda- where players more or less simply explore without much in the way of real hints as to what they’re supposed to be doing other than assemble the triforce.  And, indeed, test groups who played the initial game tended to get confused as to what to do.  Miyamoto argued, and eventually convinced the executives, that the game’s underlying premise of just exploring and seeing what there was to see in the world created didn’t need to be changed.  Turns out, he was right.

Expand for References

The post The Origin of the Legend of Zelda appeared first on Today I Found Out.

In 1860, the clean shaven Abraham Lincoln was running for President of the United States. That’s when he received the following letter from an 11 year old girl by the name of Grace Bedell from New York, dated October 15, 1860:

Dear Sir

My father has just home from the fair and brought home your picture and Mr. Hamlin’s. I am a little girl only 11 years old, but want you should be President of the United States very much so I hope you wont think me very bold to write to such a great man as you are. Have you any little girls about as large as I am if so give them my love and tell her to write to me if you cannot answer this letter. I have yet got four brothers and part of them will vote for you any way and if you let your whiskers grow I will try and get the rest of them to vote for you you would look a great deal better for your face is so thin. All the ladies like whiskers and they would tease their husbands to vote for you and then you would be President. My father is going to vote for you and if I was a man I would vote for you to but I will try to get every one to vote for you that I can I think that rail fence around your picture makes it look very pretty I have got a little baby sister she is nine weeks old and is just as cunning as can be. When you direct your letter direct to Grace Bedell Westfield Chautauqua County New York.

I must not write any more answer this letter right off Good bye

Grace Bedell

Apparently not too busy campaigning to answer the letter of a little girl, Lincoln wrote her back from Illinois on October 19, 1860:

My dear little Miss

Your very agreeable letter of the 15th is received – I regret the necessity of saying I have no daughters – I have three sons – one seventeen, one nine, and one seven years of age. They, with their mother, constitute my whole family. As to the whiskers have never worn any do you not think people would call it a silly affection if I were to begin it now?

Your very sincere well wisher

A. Lincoln

Lincoln had numerous documented instances of self-deprecating jokes concerning his less than attractive visage. In once such instance, while publicly debating with his longtime rival Stephen Douglas- after Douglas called him “two-faced”- Lincoln reportedly replied, “If I had another face, do you think I’d wear this one?” (Note: Douglas was not only Lincoln’s political rival, but also a rival outside of politics- Lincoln’s wife, Mary Todd was courted by both Lincoln and Douglas originally.  In the end, Lincoln perhaps wished he’d lost that battle given accounts of his married life- more in the Bonus Facts below.)

Given his attitude about his appearance, it’s perhaps not surprising that despite not definitively saying he would grow a beard, after replying to “little Miss” on October 19, 1860, Lincoln’s facial hair situation went like this (personally, I think he should have stopped at the middle one):

But this isn’t the end of the story. On Lincoln’s trip from Illinois to Washington D.C., the now President-elect made a stop in Westfield, New York on February 19, 1861.

On the train platform, he related the story behind his decision to grow a beard and asked if the little girl in question was in the crowd. She was and approached; at which point, according to Bedell, he said:

‘Gracie, look at my whiskers. I have been growing them for you.’ Then he kissed me. I never saw him again.

If you liked this article, you might also enjoy:

• When Lincoln Was Almost Assassinated Nine Months Before He was Assassinated
• The Secret Message Hidden in Abraham Lincoln’s Pocket Watch
• Abraham Lincoln Established the Secret Service on the Day He was Shot by John Wilkes Booth
• John Wilkes Booth’s Brother Saved Abraham Lincoln’s Son’s Life Shortly Before Lincoln Was Assassinated
• Abraham Lincoln the Animal Lover

Bonus Facts:

• Abraham Lincoln married Mary Todd, at the Edward’s home (her sister’s place) in Springfield, Illinois. Nicknamed Molly, Mary Todd first met Lincoln in 1840 when she was 21 and he was 31. Her family wasn’t too happy about the relationship because of Lincoln’s poverty & lack of political prospects. Nevertheless, she accepted his proposal and they were engaged. In 1841, they broke off the engagement and were separated for a while, till the fall of 1842. It was then, with the help of mutual friends (Mr. and Mrs. Simeon Francis), that the couple reunited and wasted no time in getting married (married after just 1 day back together, in fact).  Some speculate the rush was because Todd was pregnant with their future child Robert Todd Lincoln, or that Todd had seduced Lincoln into having sex with her, then forced him to marry her the next day.  There is no direct evidence of this, but Lincoln’s best man stated on Lincoln’s wedding day, he “looked like a man going to the slaughter” and it was reported that he also referred to his bride to be as “the devil” on the way to his wedding.  Their marriage was rocky right from the start and never seemed to get better.  Once, after a man sought retribution with Lincoln over his wife’s behavior (including beating the man with a broom), Lincoln said to him “Taggart, I’ve been putting up with her for the past 15 years, can you not put up with her for just 5 minutes for our friendship’s sake?”
• Shortly before Lincoln decided to grow a beard, something of a beard revolution swept the United States and by the mid-19th century the formerly predominately clean-shaven men of America now nearly universally were sporting beards. In fact, one reporter, doing a story on the new trend in 1857, walked the streets of Boston and after counting 543 men that walked by him, found that 62% of them were now sporting bushy beards and all but 4 of the rest had some other type of significant facial hair. Even those four that lacked any significant facial hair sported what would later be called Side Burns, after General Ambrose Burnside.
• The clean shaven look that Lincoln at the time was still clinging too, was essentially out of style. Needless to say, had Lincoln been running today, his campaign manager, rather than a little girl, would have told him he needed to grow some facial hair with most of the voting populace sporting it- particularly because at the time facial hair in America began being associated with radicalism; the Republican party was that.
• John C. Frémont was the first candidate for the American Presidency to sport a beard when he ran in 1856.
• After Lincoln, every elected President except William McKinley would sport facial hair. This trend finally ended when Woodrow Wilson took office in 1913.  From then on, U.S. Presidents have remained clean shaven.
• During the Civil War, Bedell, now aged 15 in 1864, wrote another letter to Lincoln, only very recently discovered in 2007. This time, she was asking if Lincoln could help her find work as her father had recently lost “nearly all his property” and she wanted to help support her family, though her parents hadn’t asked her too. There is no record of whether Lincoln replied or ever even saw the letter.
• As for what happened to Bedell, she went on to marry a Civil War veteran by the name of George Billings sometime around 1870 and took up work first farming, and then later George switched to banking. She lived to the ripe old age of 87 years old, dying in 1936.

Expand for References

The post The Little Girl Responsible for Lincoln’s Beard appeared first on Today I Found Out.

Right now, two men on skis pulling 440 lb sleds are inching their way across the Antartic continent, bound for the South Pole and then back again. Ben Saunders and Tarka L'Herpiniere are attempting to complete, solo and unsupported, the same journey that claimed the lives of Robert Falcon Scott and his party in 1912. They're calling it The Scott Expedition.

Saunders has been working towards this goal for more than 10 years with many false starts. His former partner in exploration, Tony Haile, explains the journey before the journey:

In short, a South Pole expedition is pretty much the worst way to spend four months you could possibly imagine, but if you were to ask Ben I don't think he would say that's the tough part. The tough part is getting to the start line in the first place. Antarctica is far away from everywhere and doing anything in Antarctica is ridiculously expensive. Imagine if you kept a car in New York but the only way to fuel that car was to charter a private jet and fly fuel in from England. That's the logistics of an Antarctic expedition and between us we had no cash and no clue how to get any.

We didn't go to the South Pole in 2003. Or 2004. Or 2005. Living month to month on whatever I could scrounge together, putting together small expeditions or managing other people's just so I wouldn't lose my connection to the cold places, I grew to fear and then hate my parent's yearly Christmas letter to their friends which would explain 'Anthony has decided to postpone his South Pole expedition for another year to raise more funds'. For Ben and I, we had proclaimed a grand goal. We had told people year after year this was the year we were finally going to go south. And every year we had to look at the nervous smiles as we publicly failed. Again and again.

The journey is just underway...the plan is to travel 1800 miles to and from the South Pole and you can track their progress online and read tweets and blog posts from Ben and Tarka along the way. Back in 2005, when Ben and Tony were planning this trip the first time around, they sold miles of the expedition for donations of $100 apiece. They didn't make it that year obviously and in the days before Kickstarter, crowdsourcing $180,000 was a bit more difficult than it is now. But I bought a mile back then (I actually got mile #900, the point at which they'll reach the pole) and I am beyond excited that they've set off and can't wait to see how the trip progresses. Good luck, Ben and Tarka!

Dad Shawn Dawson, of Albany, OR, came up with the perfect present for his littlest girl:

Dear Free-Range Kids: My daughter had her birthday last weekend, and in the weeks leading up to it she has expressed an interest in both whittling and archery.  Well figuring that at age 8 it was time she learned a bit more about safely handling a knife, one present I purchased for her was a very small, pink, swiss army knife.  It’s quite small, but will serve the purpose of teaching her how a knife is a tool (it also has tweezers, scissors, nail file, and a screwdriver) that should be used properly and taken care of.  Any tool can hurt, if one misuses it.  We have talked about how to keep the blade clean, wiping it with a rag from the blunt side of the knife, using oil not water to clean it, and so on.

BTW, while this does not show proportions well, the knife is here:

Works on apron strings, too!

For the past week, she has been quite useful around the house, ready to help cut the plastic off of boxes and the like.    Playing outside one day, I noticed her cutting the top off a pop can, so I talked to her about that.  This is not proper use because it will ruin the blade.  I set her up with a bar of soap, and let her practice using the knife on that.  We talked about cutting away from you, not towards you.  But all the talk does not help unless one practices.

In short, a week later, we have had no injuries and she has learned a bit about the knife as a tool.   I think it helped my wife not to worry as the blade really is quite small, and while there may be a slip at some time, it won’t do any major harm.

Now the interesting part is the reaction of my acquaintances, several of whom have seemed genuinely *shocked* that I would give a pocket knife to an 8 year old 2nd grade girl as a birthday present.  It appears that in todays hyper-fear climate, the knife is a step below a handgun, and should not be handled by a grade school child.  I have friends with children in the 4th and 5th grade who said they certainly would not allow their children to “play with knives”!  Sheesh.

I am 50.  This is my 4th daughter (ranging in age from 8 to 27 now).  I was born in 1963, and when I was a child in the early ’70s, most of my friends had pocket knifes — frequently in their pockets at school.  I find the state of fear that has become ‘normal’ in today’s society to be depressing.

In any case, I am looking for archery classes next. – S.D.

Wes Anderson is coming out with a new horror movie. Here's the trailer:

Ha ha just kidding it's a SNL spoof. Ed Norton does a pretty ripping Owen Wilson.

This video dicusses three simple ways to travel through time (all of which you can do right now at home) and three not-so-simple time travel methods.

For more on time-travel, here are some works by physicist and time-lord Sean Carroll:

Rules for time-travellers - http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cos...

Learn more about time and time-machines in his book From Eternity to Here - http://preposterousuniverse.com/etern...

Visualizations of the spinning universe - http://iopscience.iop.org/1367-2630/1...

An engaging talk on the Paradoxes of Time Travel - https://vimeo.com/11917849

(via digg)

No one wants a blog post about why a blogger hasn't blogged. So boring. Let’s not do that!

Before we begin with these gentle suggestions: many of you have been asking when I'm going to do another writing workshop. Unfortunately I don't have an answer yet. I want to generate material for a new workshop, and I just haven't had the time. More on that soon-ish.

A Tale for the Time Being

A writer in the Pacific Northwest finds, washed up on the shore, the diary of a Japanese schoolgirl considering suicide. This book is magical and funny and heartbreaking. I read it, then I read it again, and now I think about it more than is healthy.

Wired for Story: The Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence

Science! I was skeptical about this one, but I really liked it. With most how-to novel-writing books, their advice seems to be “write a bunch of words, and make them all good.” Which is correct, but lacking a certain something. I found this one extremely helpful in pinning down what “good” is and how to keep a reader from tossing your book into the trash. Or the recycling, if she’s eco-conscious.

Minimalist Parenting

Last but not least, my friends Asha and Christine are the authors of Minimalist Parenting: Enjoy Modern Family Life More by Doing Less.  I am a fan of minimalism, and of this book. If you’re struggling to find ways to ease the pressures of modern parenting, this is a great choice.

Even better: between October 1-31, they’re donating 100% of royalties for books purchased via this link (and the one above) to WOMEN AT RISK, an Ethiopian organization that helps women lift themselves out of prostitution. So if you're interested, make sure to use that link, and buy before Halloween!

Say, you! What are you reading right now?

Reflections on how to keep the center solid as you continue to evolve.

On October 23, 2006, I sent a short email to a few friends at work — one of the four jobs I held while paying my way through college — with the subject line “brain pickings,” announcing my intention to start a weekly digest featuring five stimulating things to learn about each week, from a breakthrough in neuroscience to a timeless piece of poetry. “It should take no more than 4 minutes (hopefully much less) to read,” I promised. This was the inception of Brain Pickings. At the time, I neither planned nor anticipated that this tiny experiment would one day be included in the Library of Congress digital archive of “materials of historical importance” and the few friends would become millions of monthly readers all over the world, ranging from the Dutch high school student who wrote to me this morning to my 77-year-old grandmother in Bulgaria to the person in Wisconsin who mailed me strudel last week. (Thank you!) Above all, I had no idea that in the seven years to follow, this labor of love would become my greatest joy and most profound source of personal growth, my life and my living, my sense of purpose, my center. (For the curious, more on the origin story here.)

Illustration by Maurice Sendak from 'I'll Be You and You Be Me' by Ruth Krauss, 1954. Click image for more.

Looking back today on the thousands of hours I’ve spent researching and writing Brain Pickings and the countless collective hours of readership it has germinated — a smile-inducing failure on the four-minute promise — I choke up with gratitude for the privilege of this journey, for its endless rewards of heart, mind and spirit, and for all the choices along the way that made it possible. I’m often asked to offer advice to young people who are just beginning their own voyages of self-discovery, or those reorienting their calling at any stage of life, and though I feel utterly unqualified to give “advice” in that omniscient, universally wise sense the word implies, here are seven things I’ve learned in seven years of making those choices, of integrating “work” and life in such inextricable fusion, and in chronicling this journey of heart, mind and spirit — a journey that took, for whatever blessed and humbling reason, so many others along for the ride. I share these here not because they apply to every life and offer some sort of blueprint to existence, but in the hope that they might benefit your own journey in some small way, bring you closer to your own center, or even simply invite you to reflect on your own sense of purpose.

Illustration from 'Inside the Rainbow: Russian Children's Literature 1920-35.' Click image for more.

1. Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind. Cultivate that capacity for “negative capability.” We live in a culture where one of the greatest social disgraces is not having an opinion, so we often form our “opinions” based on superficial impressions or the borrowed ideas of others, without investing the time and thought that cultivating true conviction necessitates. We then go around asserting these donned opinions and clinging to them as anchors to our own reality. It’s enormously disorienting to simply say, “I don’t know.” But it’s infinitely more rewarding to understand than to be right — even if that means changing your mind about a topic, an ideology, or, above all, yourself.
2. Do nothing for prestige or status or money or approval alone. As Paul Graham observed, “prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.” Those extrinsic motivators are fine and can feel life-affirming in the moment, but they ultimately don’t make it thrilling to get up in the morning and gratifying to go to sleep at night — and, in fact, they can often distract and detract from the things that do offer those deeper rewards.
3. Be generous. Be generous with your time and your resources and with giving credit and, especially, with your words. It’s so much easier to be a critic than a celebrator. Always remember there is a human being on the other end of every exchange and behind every cultural artifact being critiqued. To understand and be understood, those are among life’s greatest gifts, and every interaction is an opportunity to exchange them.

4. Build pockets of stillness into your life. Meditate. Go for walks. Ride your bike going nowhere in particular. There is a creative purpose to daydreaming, even to boredom. The best ideas come to us when we stop actively trying to coax the muse into manifesting and let the fragments of experience float around our unconscious mind in order to click into new combinations. Without this essential stage of unconscious processing, the entire flow of the creative process is broken.

   Most importantly, sleep. Besides being the greatest creative aphrodisiac, sleep also affects our every waking moment, dictates our social rhythm, and even mediates our negative moods. Be as religious and disciplined about your sleep as you are about your work. We tend to wear our ability to get by on little sleep as some sort of badge of honor that validates our work ethic. But what it really is is a profound failure of self-respect and of priorities. What could possibly be more important than your health and your sanity, from which all else springs?

5. When people tell you who they are, Maya Angelou famously advised, believe them. Just as importantly, however, when people try to tell you who you are, don’t believe them. You are the only custodian of your own integrity, and the assumptions made by those that misunderstand who you are and what you stand for reveal a great deal about them and absolutely nothing about you.
6. Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity. Ours is a culture that measures our worth as human beings by our efficiency, our earnings, our ability to perform this or that. The cult of productivity has its place, but worshipping at its altar daily robs us of the very capacity for joy and wonder that makes life worth living — for, as Annie Dillard memorably put it, “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
7. “Expect anything worthwhile to take a long time.” This is borrowed from the wise and wonderful Debbie Millman, for it’s hard to better capture something so fundamental yet so impatiently overlooked in our culture of immediacy. The myth of the overnight success is just that — a myth — as well as a reminder that our present definition of success needs serious retuning. As I’ve reflected elsewhere, the flower doesn’t go from bud to blossom in one spritely burst and yet, as a culture, we’re disinterested in the tedium of the blossoming. But that’s where all the real magic unfolds in the making of one’s character and destiny.

One of Maurice Sendak's vintage posters celebrating the joy of reading. Click image for more.

Then, just for good measure, here are seven of my favorite pieces from the past seven years. (Yes, it is exactly like picking your favorite child — so take it with a grain of salt.)

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A reader is feeling good this morning:

After watching Democrats throughout my life continually bungle political opportunity, for once it’s really nice to bask in the utter incompetence of the Republicans for a change.  Had they just continued to be uniform in their resistance to the Affordable Care Act and then seized upon its horrendously planned, bureaucratically challenged, abysmally orchestrated roll-out, the Republicans would all be in tall cotton right now, with the mid-term elections just around the corner.

Instead, they decide to try to suicide-bomb Obamacare, knowing that Democrats have to blink for them to “win” (a strategy where they do not control their own destiny) and all the media can talk about is the idiocy of the Republican party.  The Obamacare rollout mess doesn’t even register within the noise of the shutdown and kamikaze debt-ceiling threats.  Heck, if they would have done nothing but complain loudly, Kathleen Sebelius would have resigned by now and the President’s signature legislation would look like a huge failure.

Instead, the administration gets to fix it under less media scrutiny, and Obama’s negotiating is getting compared to Michael Corleone: “My offer is nothing.”

Over the past three weeks, the Dish has cranked out 174 posts related to the government shutdown. But if you didn’t have time to follow the thread, this summary should suffice:

Or as we noted yesterday from Congresswoman Jacqueline Speier:

This is like a pre school that’s gone awry.

(Just so I don't bury the lede too much here: THIS IS INSANE.) Wingsuit flyers keep upping the ante. For awhile, it was enough to glide at 100 mph a foot or two off the ground. Then they started flying through gaps between skyscrapers. And then through holes in mountains. Last year, Gary Connery landed safely in a pile of cardboard boxes without the use of a parachute. And now, watch as Raphael Dumont, straps on his wingsuit, climbs an Italian mountain, and LANDS SAFELY ON A LAKE WITHOUT A PARACHUTE.

Raphael Dumont, human seaplane. That shit cray.

Update: Rumblings on Twitter are indicating that this is fake. I WANT TO BELIEVE. (But that footage of the landing is shot on the world's shakiest camera for no reason so...)

We all know Obama shut down the US government for fascist socialist Muslim reasons, but I persist in my childish belief that many of the Congressional Republicans are straight-up clowns.

More here in WMxdesign's GOP Clown College Flickr set.

Felix Salmon provides a reality check:

The global faith in US institutions has already been undermined. The mechanism by which catastrophe would arise has already been set into motion. And as a result, economic growth in both the US and the rest of the world will be lower than it should be. Unemployment will be higher. Social unrest will be more destructive. These things aren’t as bad now as they would be if we actually got to a point of payment default. …

While debt default is undoubtedly the worst of all possible worlds, then, the bonkers level of Washington dysfunction on display right now is nearly as bad. Every day that goes past is a day where trust and faith in the US government is evaporating — and once it has evaporated, it will never return. The Republicans in the House have already managed to inflict significant, lasting damage to the US and the global economy — even if they were to pass a completely clean bill tomorrow morning, which they won’t. The default has already started, and is already causing real harm. The only question is how much worse it’s going to get.

What is being undermined is America’s central place in the global economy. To dislodge the US from that because the GOP lost the last election is so out of proportion with any conceivable gains even hostage-takers and blackmailers could get it is almost the definition of insanity. I once wrote an essay on the degeneracy of American conservatism – about 15 years ago! – which I called “Going Down Screaming.” But what this rogue faction of fanatics is doing is bringing us all down screaming. They are not negotiating. They are sabotaging their own country.

Except, it’s clear to me at least that this is not how they see it.

They are sabotaging what they regard as someone else’s country – the country that voted for Obama twice, that gave the popular vote majority in the House to Democrats, that gave the Senate to the Democrats, that has a majority for marriage equality, that desperately needs immigration reform, and that, in any long-term fiscal Grand Bargain, must have more revenues for any deal to work.

That’s why I come back to the analogy of a cold civil war. The reluctance of the South to pay the debts of the nation which led to the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of the national debt. It seems to me that if the House GOP really does intend to destroy the American and global economy, to throw millions out of work, to make our debt problem far worse in a new depression … just to make a point about Obamacare, then at some point, Obama, like Lincoln, must preserve the republic.

But no president should ever want to take that position – because it represents the collapse of the American polity. But we are in collapse. If the House pushes the country into default this week, there is no workable American polity left. The most basic forms of collective responsibility will have been forsaken for almost pathological ideological purism and cultural revolt.

Today I found out the man who gave the world one of the most enduring fictional characters of all time, James Bond, also wrote Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

The man was Ian Fleming. Born May 28, 1908 to a wealthy family in London, he and his three brothers were educated at Eton College, the same school Princes William and Harry attended. Fleming was supposedly a master of athletics. After Eton, he attended Sandhurst and chose to study in Munich and Geneva, where he had the Alps as a backdrop. He would later learn to ski and climb the mountains, perhaps not surprising given his athletic history, which would also set the stage for some of his yet-to-be-conceived character in the James Bond books.

Fleming jumped from career to career almost as often as he switched girlfriends. He was known to be a “womaniser,” not that the ladies seemed to mind—apparently they thought him very attractive. In this way, he didn’t differ much from Bond himself.  He first tried to establish himself in the military, followed by an attempt to become a foreign diplomat—both were unsuccessful.

He later enjoyed a stint working for Reuters, where he learned basic journalism skills and covered a case about a Russian spy. However, he knew there wasn’t a lot of money to be had in journalism—at least not for him—and he decided to pursue a career as a stockbroker.

However, the world was fast approaching World War II.  Despite the fact that his father had died while serving in World War I when Fleming was just nine, it didn’t deter him from entering the war effort when World War II broke out.

He started out as a Lieutenant Commander RNVR in Naval Intelligence, gathering information that helped the smooth-running of the Allied war effort. He later became the personal assistant to the director.

His work took him on many overseas visits, notably to the United States where he had a hand in the establishment of what would become the CIA. Specifically, while on a trip to D.C., Fleming worked with a group to come up with a blueprint for the Office of the Coordinator of Intelligence—a department that eventually evolved into the CIA.

Much of what Fleming learned during his time with Naval Intelligence likely helped to shape the Bond books, though Fleming was never able to speak openly about his work because he signed the Official Secrets Act. However, it is thought that his director, Admiral John Godfrey, was the inspiration for the character M. In Diamonds are Forever, published in 1956, where he wrote, “There was a creak from M’s chair and Bond looked across the table at the man who held a great deal of his affection and all his loyalty and obedience.”

After the war, Fleming had taken up a job as the Foreign Manager of The Sunday Times, but he started talking about wanting to write “the spy novel to end all spy novels.” No doubt after his experiences during the war, in which he liaised with spies but never truly became one, he had quite a lot of fodder waiting to be turned into a book. Before any writing could be accomplished, however, Fleming decided to get his life in order.

First, he negotiated a contract with his employers that allowed him three months off a year. Then, he started building a house in Jamaica. He’d fallen in love with the country when he visited during a naval intelligence meeting and vowed to return someday. Naming his house Goldeneye, after a mission during the war, he settled in to write.

Some say that he started writing the novels to impress his soon-to-be wife, Ann, Lady Rothermere. He had been having an affair with Ann for several years. After she became pregnant with their second child (the first was stillborn) she divorced her husband and joined Fleming in Jamaica. But Ann had surrounded herself with writers in London, and perhaps he thought publishing a book would allow him into that circle.

Whatever the case, the first James Bond novel, Casino Royale, was published in 1953. It was written in just two months while Fleming was on “vacation” in Jamaica, a trend he continued for subsequent books. He kept on working for The Sunday Times until 1959, using his three months’ vacation to write.

The job was actually pretty useful for his book writing career: it allowed him to connect with people from all over the world, so he was able to check facts about geography, history, and culture with people who lived in the areas he was writing if he was not able to visit himself. This, along with his tendency to include brands of items in his books, added a level of realism to his stories.

For the most part, the popularity of the books rose steadily, though they received a few big surges as well. First, President John F. Kennedy cited From Russia With Love as one of his favourite reads, resulting in sales rising sharply in the United States. (Incidentally, he actually met President Kennedy and the First Lady in Washington, D.C. and reported that it was one of his favourite fan encounters.)

Secondly, the first James Bond movie—Dr. No—was released in 1962, starring the talented Sean Connery as Bond. Fleming would also live to see From Russia With Love made into a hit film, as well as some of the filming of Goldfinger. Many more Bond films have since been created, of course, with a range of actors playing the title character including, most recently, Daniel Craig.

But Fleming wouldn’t live to see exactly how huge his books—and subsequent movies—would become. He was suffering from heart disease and had his first heart attack in 1962.

Told not to work during his recovery, he started writing a book on the sly for his only son, Caspar, who was ten at the time. Was this his next great Bond book or perhaps some sort of “James Bond Jr.” novel geared for a younger audience?  Nope. The adventuresome novel was a fantastical tale about a flying car: Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. This book would, of course, go on to be made into a movie that would become a family classic, but Fleming was never able to see it for himself.

Ian Fleming died on his son’s twelfth birthday—August 12, 1964—after suffering from many different health issues. Needless to say, that was quite the traumatic experience for a boy to suffer at such a young age, and Caspar was plagued by mental health issues in his teen years until he committed suicide in 1975 at the age of 23.

Nevertheless, Fleming’s legacy lives on. His Bond books as well as Chitty Chitty Bang Bang have never left print. Fleming proved to be a talented writer whose books were able to stand the test of time with great descriptions, interesting characters, and an engaging plot. In an article about how to write a thriller, Fleming said it was easy:

There is only one recipe for a best seller. You have to get the reader to turn over the page.

And that’s just what he did.

If you liked this article, you might also enjoy:

• Was One of the Bond Girls Really a Man?
• When the CIA Tried to Use Cats as Spies
• The One-Legged Woman Who was “The Most Dangerous of All Allied Spies”
• The Movie “Goldfinger” was Once Banned in Israel
• Julia Child was Once a Top Secret Researcher for the Predecessor for the CIA

Bonus James Bond Facts:

• The name “James Bond” is actually that of an ornithologist. Originally, Fleming wanted James bond to be a boring, ordinary man who happened to experience some extraordinary things. He knew about an ornithologist named James Bond from Bond’s book, Birds of the West Indies, which he had read in his youth and thought the author’s name was one of the most boring names he’d ever heard. However, the boring name soon became rather exciting. Mrs. Ornithologist Bond actually sent Fleming a letter thanking him for using the name.
• Fleming wasn’t the only writer in his family. His elder brother, Peter, made a career out of travel writing. He also has two nephews and a niece who are published authors.

Expand for References

The post The Man Who Created James Bond Also Wrote Chitty Chitty Bang Bang appeared first on Today I Found Out.

Today I found out that Denny’s started out as a doughnut shop.

For those not familiar, Denny’s is a restaurant popular throughout North America whose slogan is “America’s Diner is always open.” It also has some branches in various South American countries, and a few as far afield as Japan, New Zealand, and the United Arab Emirates, though it hasn’t quite made it to Europe yet. True to their slogan, they’re always open, even at night and on holidays, except in some places where it’s required by law that they close at certain times.

Today, Denny’s serves all kinds of food, like sandwiches, burgers, steak, spaghetti, and fish and chips. However, it’s probably best known for its breakfast items. With all of the meals on its menu now, it’s pretty hard to believe that Denny’s started out as a simple doughnut shop.

Founders Richard Jezak and Harold Butler probably didn’t anticipate the massive expansion they’d soon see when they set up the first “Danny’s Donuts” in 1953 in Lakewood, California.

Butler said of his start-up in the beginning, “We’re going to serve the best cup of coffee; make the best doughnuts; give the best service; keep everything spotless; offer the best value; and stay open 24 hours a day.” Quite ambitious.

Why doughnuts? It seems that Butler, at least, had experience with running a doughnut shop in Buffalo, New York. When he was a child, his father left the family and Butler did things like count buttons in order to help bring in some money. He also sold doughnuts, which eventually led to him owning his own doughnut shop. However, he realized that he didn’t want to spend his life in Buffalo so he closed the shop and headed out to California.

Just one year after being established, however, Danny’s Donuts became more than just a doughnut shop. The menu expanded to include sandwiches and other entrees. Just a few years later, the restaurant itself expanded, too; by 1959, some twenty Danny’s Donuts had opened around California. That same year, the store was renamed Denny’s because people were beginning to confuse it with another chain, “Coffee Dan’s”.

By 1981, Denny’s had over one thousand restaurants across the United States. Today, Denny’s is as popular as ever, boasting 1600 restaurants in 2010 with a vision to continue growing. Strangely enough, Denny’s doesn’t seem to have a soft spot for its humble beginnings—doughnuts are no longer offered on the official menu.

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• Ben & Jerry’s was Originally Going to Be a Bagel Company
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Bonus Facts:

• Denny’s isn’t the only chain with humble beginnings. “The Cheesecake Factory” was once just a wholesale bakery specializing in cheesecake; “Cracker Barrel” started off as a gas station/restaurant hybrid; and the man who started TGI Friday’s just wanted a place to meet airline hostesses.
• Denny’s was originally “Danny’s” simply because the founders thought that the name was familiar and it worked well with “Doughnuts”.
• Harold Butler died in 1998. He ceased his involvement in Denny’s in 1971 after a bad business move, but he continued to start up other restaurants and was involved in the creation of several other chains such as Jojo’s. Restaurants were his passion; he’s been quoted as saying, “I love to feed people.”
• The Denny’s “Grand Slam”, one of their most popular menu items, originated in Atlanta and is thought to be in homage to Hank Aaron. Today, the Grand Slam Breakfast involves choosing four items from a list that includes toast, eggs, sausages, and bacon, among other things.

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The post Denny’s Started Out as a Doughnut Shop appeared first on Today I Found Out.

In Focus has a nice slideshow of photos of blimps, dirigibles, and airships, from the first flights in the early 1900s to the Hindenberg disaster to the blimps flying high over sporting events.

(via @alexismadrigal)