Nicole

For a show that spent much of its first few seasons focused on a bevy of male kings (and wannabe kings), Game of Thrones has taken a turn toward its women. If you haven’t yet watched Sunday’s season 6 finale yet, we won’t spoil it here, except to say that it’s the ladies who rule the day.

Leading the pack, of course, is Daenerys Stormborn, the Targaryen queen who has been working her way, ever so slowly, across the sea to Westeros, toward that cursed Iron Throne. Dany has been a fan favorite from the beginning because of her ferocity as a ruler, tempered by her compassion, and, well, the dragons who call her mother. But you don’t have to look solely to fiction to find similarly badass women who’ve ruled kingdoms. Here are a few picks to catch you up on the real-life figures who proved as tough and commanding as Daenerys. (Sorry, no dragons, though.)

The Life of Elizabeth I, by Alison Weir
Perhaps no ruler draws quite as many comparisons to Dany as the first Queen Elizabeth. Given her track record with the men in her life, Daenerys can’t be blamed for questioning who she trusts. Similarly, Elizabeth was born the daughter of a lecherous royal tyrant, a path that led her to keep her own counsel and become the woman we know as the Virgin Queen. Of course, Elizabeth and all of Tudor England have been dissected to the nth degree, but Weir’s biography manages to cut through the myths and imbue this famous queen with a personality that leaps off the page.

Hild, by Nicola Griffith
Though it’s firmly rooted in historical fact, the 7th-century Britain of Hild smacks as much of fantasy as any of the A Song of Ice and Fire books. The central figure of the novel, the young woman who would become St. Hilda of Whitby, isn’t the named ruler of her kingdom, but she’s responsible for much of the power behind the throne. (As Cersei and Margaery know, this is no small feat.) Hild’s curiosity and intellect lead her to the role of the king’s seer, where her powers are more rooted in logic than the supernatural. In a time of epic turbulence, Hild proved being bright and willful were assets—even for girls.

Cleopatra: A Life, by Stacy Schiff
Her skill with strategy and high-stakes diplomacy ensured Cleopatra would be written about and remembered far beyond her short time on earth. While we at Barnes & Noble can’t condone all of Cleopatra’s actions (there is the matter of her two dead brother-husbands), we have to admit she got things done, including the reshaping of an empire. Clever beyond measure and more than willing to do what she had to, she was a woman with no peers in her own time, and few since. Schiff’s historical fiction offering reconstructs Cleopatra’s life in a way that minimizes her notorious love affairs and shines a light on the bold personality that changed the world forever.

Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman, by Robert K. Massie
In 34 years of ruling Russia, there’s little Catherine didn’t have to contend with, from war and internal rebellion to the upheaval spawned by the French Revolution. It takes a steady hand to guide a nation through such turbulent waters, and to come out of it with moniker like her. She yearned to be the theoretical “benevolent despot,” and to some, she achieved it. Massie won a Pulitzer for his peek into the lives of the last of the Romanovs, and his characteristic historical precision and empathy are on display in this biography of one of the pillars of Russia, and one of the most important rulers—male or female—in history.

The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women Across the Ancient World, by Adrienne Mayor
It can be hard to separate fact from fiction, particularly when history was written largely by men concentrated in a small pocket of the ancient world. Mayor attempts to sort through the myth to uncover the truth about the legendary Amazons, the warrior women who so vexed the rulers of ancient Greece, Rome, and Persia. Were they real? Mayor presents a compelling case that at the root of the mythology, there very much were women dotting the landscape of the ancient world who delighted in their own autonomy and ferocity. In more than one sense, the Amazons were real, and their route to becoming mythic figures has much to teach us.

Albert Einstein passionately wooed his first wife Mileva Maric, against his family’s wishes, and the two had a turbulent but intellectually rich relationship that they recorded for posterity in their letters. Einstein and Maric’s love letters have inspired the short film above, My Little Witch (in Serbian, I believe, with English subtitles) and several critical re-evaluations of Einstein’s life and Maric’s influence on his early thought. Some historians have even suggested that Maric—who was also trained in physics—made contributions to Einstein’s early work, a claim hotly disputed and, it seems, poorly substantiated.

The letters—written between 1897 and 1903 and only discovered in 1987—reveal a wealth of previously unknown detail about Maric and the marriage. While the controversy over Maric’s influence on Einstein’s theories raged among academics and viewers of PBS’s controversial documentary, Einstein’s Wife, a scandalous personal item in the letters got much better press. As Einstein and Mileva’s relationship deteriorated, and they attempted to scotch tape it together for the sake of their children, the avuncular pacifist wrote a chilling list of “conditions,” in outline form, that his wife must accept upon his return. Lists of Note transcribes them from Walter Isaacson’s biography Einstein: His Life and Universe:

CONDITIONS

A. You will make sure:

1. that my clothes and laundry are kept in good order;
2. that I will receive my three meals regularly in my room;
3. that my bedroom and study are kept neat, and especially that my desk is left for my use only.

B. You will renounce all personal relations with me insofar as they are not completely necessary for social reasons. Specifically, You will forego:

1. my sitting at home with you;
2. my going out or travelling with you.

C. You will obey the following points in your relations with me:

1. you will not expect any intimacy from me, nor will you reproach me in any way;
2. you will stop talking to me if I request it;
3. you will leave my bedroom or study immediately without protest if I request it.

D. You will undertake not to belittle me in front of our children, either through words or behavior.

While it may be unfair to judge anyone’s total character by its most glaring defects, there’s no way to read this without shuddering. Although Einstein tried to preserve the marriage, once they separated for good, he did not lament Mileva’s loss for long. Manjit Kumar tells us in Quantum: Einstein Bohr, and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality that although “Mileva agreed to his demands and Einstein returned”

[I]t could not last. At the end of July, after just three months in Berlin, Mileva and the boys went back to Zurich. As he stood on the platform waving goodbye, Einstein wept, if not for Mileva and the memories of what had been, then for his two departing sons. But within a matter of weeks he was happily enjoying living alone “in my large apartment in undiminished tranquility.”

Einstein prized his solitude greatly. Another remark shows his difficulty with personal relationships. While he eventually fell in love with his cousin Elsa and finally divorced Mavic to marry her in 1919, that marriage too was troubled. Elsa died in 1936 soon after the couple moved to the U.S. Not long after her death, Einstein would write, “I have gotten used extremely well to life here. I live like a bear in my den…. This bearishness has been further enhanced by the death of my woman comrade, who was better with other people than I am.”

Einstein’s personal failings might pass by without much comment if had not, like his hero Gandhi, been elevated to the status of a “secular saint.” Yet, it is also the personal inconsistencies, the weaknesses and petty, even incredibly callous moments, that make so many famous figures’ lives compelling, if also confusing. As Einstein scholar John Stachel says, “Too much of an idol was made of Einstein. He’s not an idol—he’s a human, and that’s much more interesting.”

Related Content:

Listen as Albert Einstein Reads ‘The Common Language of Science’ (1941)

The Musical Mind of Albert Einstein: Great Physicist, Amateur Violinist and Devotee of Mozart

Einstein Documentary Offers A Revealing Portrait of the Great 20th Century Scientist

Albert Einstein Expresses His Admiration for Mahatma Gandhi, in Letter and Audio

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

Albert Einstein Imposes on His First Wife a Cruel List of Marital Demands is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture by signing up for our Daily Email. That is the most reliable and convenient option. You can also find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus.

I loved the groom and groomsmen attire at Danielle and Johnny’s Romantic New Zealand Wedding. Johnny, the groom, wore a white shirt, black suit (with a black tie and waistcoat) from  Crane Brothers. His groomsmen wore black suits from Van Meer Suit Hire with shoes from Shoe Connection.

Photos by Mary Sylvia Photography

Want More? Check Out These Posts:

1. Groom Style: Mark
2. Groom Style – Cameron
3. Groom Style – James

books0977:

My Books (1919). Honor C. Appleton (1879-1951). Blackies Children’s Annual, 1921 edition.

Shows a little girl lying on the floor, reading, surrounded by books. The characters in the books come alive!

Blackies and other publishers came up with the idea of taking the best of the year’s stories, articles, and illustrations and putting them together in one bound volume called an Annual. The publishers advertised them as an ideal Christmas present which was educational as well as pleasurable. 

Though definitely a writer, and an acclaimed one at that, Jennifer Egan does not allow the traditionally written word to contain her. In 2010, her book A Visit from the Goon Squad turned readerly heads by presenting itself neither as a novel nor a short story collection. It also contained an entire — chapter? story? — section in the form of a Powerpoint presentation. If you find yourself on the fence about plunging into Egan’s formally irreverent, Pulitzer Prize-winning work, you can sample its first section (not the Powerpoint one, you may feel relieved to hear) as “Found Objects,” the way the New Yorker ran it in 2007. If the loose-ends music-industry worker protagonist’s brush with kleptomania intrigues you, and if you value authorial interpretation, you can watch Egan herself read a bit of the section above. The New Yorker has also run two other pieces of Egan’s Goon Squad-era writing on its fiction pages: “Safari” and “Ask Me if I Care.” Then comes “Black Box.”

Egan composed “Black Box” for Twitter, where it ran over ten nights on the New Yorker‘s NYerFiction account. But she didn’t write it on Twitter, opting instead for longhand in a Japanese notebook printed with rectangular boxes. You can find all the tweets that comprise the story collected at Paste, and New Yorker subscribers can read the whole thing in a slightly more traditional form here. Egan spent a year on the story, which she describes as “a series of terse mental dispatches from a female spy of the future, working undercover by the Mediterranean Sea.” I’ve seen many a literary academic go into raptures about the implications of Twitter, but here we have an artist executing a genuinely intriguing project with “the odd poetry that can happen in a hundred and forty characters.” Certain generations of writers and thinkers make such a big deal about that 14o-character limit, but I notice that nobody under 35 blinks an eye at it. It’s just the way we communicate now — Egan must understand this makes it one of the most important mediums for writers to take on. You can hear her discuss that and more with New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman on the magazine’s podcast.

Related Content:

Jennifer Egan, Pulitzer Prize Winner, Talks Writing @Google

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.

Read, Hear, and See Tweeted Four Stories by Jennifer Egan, Author of A Visit from the Goon Squad is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and by Email.

Whistled language is a rare form of communication that can be mostly found in locations with isolating features such as scattered settlements or mountainous terrain. This documentary above shows how Dr. Mark Sicoli, Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University, conducts field studies among speakers of a Chinantec language, who live in the mountainous region of northern Oaxaca in Mexico. The Summer Institute of Linguistics in Mexico has recorded and transcribed a whistled conversation in Sochiapam Chinantec between two men in different fields. The result can be seen and heard here.

The most thoroughly-researched whistled language however is Silbo Gomero, the language of the island of La Gomera (Canary Islands). In 2009, it was inscribed on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The UNESCO website has a good description of this whistled language with photos and a video. Having almost died out, the language is now taught once more in schools.

By profession, Matthias Rascher teaches English and History at a High School in northern Bavaria, Germany. In his free time he scours the web for good links and posts the best finds on Twitter.

Related Content:

Learn 40 Languages for Free: Spanish, English, Chinese & More

Speaking in Whistles: The Whistled Language of Oaxaca, Mexico is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and by Email.

kentballs:

one of the latest twitter trends coming out of Japan is for young school girls to take photos with their friends doing poses and power moves from anime series like Dragon Ball Z. 

welcometogeektown:

 

The days of the middle-man are numbered. You can borrow money from peer-to-peer lenders such as Zopa without the bloated intervention of banks; read the news without the patronising control of newspaper editors; and now, through crowdfunding, you can bypass the opaque institutions that control the financing of cancer research and direct world-class medical work. [...]

The post An iCure? appeared first on Aeon Magazine.

cayayofm:

I literally just learned how to make GIF animations just so that I could loop this forever. I love that Penguin.

*coughhiremecough*

*coughoraninternshipcough*

*coughtheleastyoucoulddoisreblogthiscough*

This makes a strong case.

Doctor, what does it mean if you dream of creating a font of Freud’s handwriting?

This is exactly what German typographer Harald Geisler has in mind, and, in the spirit of self-actualization, he’s funding the project on Kickstarter. His charisma is such that he’s already raised over eight times the original $1500 goal that will allow him to travel to Vienna, where he will create the typeface in a borrowed apartment within walking distance from Freud’s former home at Berggasse 19. That address is now home to the Sigmund Freud Museum, where the romantically-minded Geisler plans to visit the hard copies of the eight letters from which his alphabet will be assembled.

Don’t let the project’s fully-in-the-black status keep you from visiting its fundraising page. In addition to being an inadvertent tutorial on the elements of a top-notch Kickstarter campaign, it also provides some interesting information with regard to penmanship, font creation, and the difference between Kurrent, the German-style script Freud learned as a schoolboy, and the Latin-style cursive that was standard among his North American patients.

Geisler says it cracks him up to imagine someone jotting a note to his or her shrink in Freud’s handwriting. Perhaps those of us not currently under the care of a psychiatry professional could use it to write our mothers.

Related Content:

Sigmund Freud Speaks: The Only Known Recording of His Voice, 1938

Jean-Paul Sartre Writes a Script for John Huston’s Film on Freud (1958)

Sigmund Freud’s Home Movies: A Rare Glimpse of His Private Life

Ayun Halliday has never regretted her childish decision to ape her mother’s highly idiosyncratic hand.

Font Based on Sigmund Freud’s Handwriting Coming Courtesy of Successful Kickstarter Campaign is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and by Email.

booksquotesandreviews:

autumn reading. (by beth retro)

I posted my first A Tour of London Bookshops post just a few weeks ago, when I visited Skoob Books, and I couldn’t have been happier with the response! I panicked slightly when I pressed the ‘publish’ button (and not only because the date was set to 2012) because I wondered whether anyone would read it, but hundreds of you did. I headed over to Bloomsbury again for today’s post, this time to visit London Review Bookshop.

London Review Bookshop is, at first glance, quite small, yet it holds over 20,000 books on two floors. I first heard about it while looking for lovely teashops to meet up with my friend Daphne, who was visiting from The Netherlands. As we’re both bookish and have a passion for, um, cake, it seemed like the perfect place to visit! It’s now one of my favourite bookshops and so I had to share it all with you. As I said before, Bloomsbury is a lovely part of London and, as you can see, there is no shortage of fantastic bookshops there!

As soon as you step into London Review Bookshop, you’re overwhelmed with books. They’re everywhere – on shelves (obviously), piled onto tables, stacked on the floor, on the counter, against the window, on top of each other. But what I especially like is that many of these titles you will not have heard of before. London Review Bookshop is curated and loved by the people who work there – they’re not just trying to sell bestsellers – each table almost has a theme to it. And books are not stacked up neatly like you might find in a chain bookstore, but fill every gap available. I enjoyed going from table to table with my friend, picking up pretty books and talking about them.

Can we all stop for a second to admire this dumbwaiter? It’s a lift. For books. I work for a book publisher and we’re on the third floor. What I wouldn’t do to have one of these in our office… In London Review Bookshop, unlike most bookshops, you’re confronted immediately with non-fiction titles, rather than fiction.

But this does not mean that they do not have an excellent fiction section. For such a tiny space, it’s pretty impressive. It’s more literary than most, too. This again means that you (or maybe just me!) come across a lot of titles that you wouldn’t have necessarily heard of before. It’s a lovely section to browse!

And now we’re downstairs, with even more non-fiction and wonderfully curated tables. They have quite a large selection of poetry, which is just not for me, but my friend became rather engrossed and I had to keep hopping around her trying to take photographs. Downstairs is also where the children’s (and some teenage) fiction is kept. As you can probably guess, it’s a section I always look forward to visiting, and I do wish it was a little larger in London Review Bookshop, but they do have a selection of children’s classics, which I like to browse. I quite like it down here because it’s always much quieter than the first floor and you can really appreciate being surrounded by books.

I quite enjoyed this quirky selection of essays, letters and diaries. I thought Tumblr would appreciate it too! London Review Bookshop really does have a ‘proper bookshop’ feel to it as opposed to a large, impersonal warehouse or a cold newsagents-like shop that just happens to have a few bookcases at the back. It’s a bookshop where the smell of paper reaches you as soon as you walk in, that’s quiet without feeling empty, with wooden floors that make that lovely sound as you walk down them, and serves as a platform to discover books you never knew existed, because they’ll never be displayed on the front page of a website. Luckily, it was full up with people who felt the same – although you cannot tell by these photos! – I had to avoid walking into people browsing the shelves.

And lastly, London Review Bookshop has made sure it’s a popular destination by having its own cake shop. It does not contain a Starbucks, or a Costa, or a Cafe Nero, but London Review Cake Shop! It’s always immensely busy and people were queueing in the bookshop, waiting to go in, when my friend and I had finished our lunch. It’s known for its delicious cakes and impressive tea selection. I opted for fresh Sicilian lemonade, quiche with rice salad, and a salted pistachio and lemon cake.

London Review Bookshop is well worth taking a trip to visit, especially if you’re hungry!

Purchased: My friend bought The Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation, which she saw on the half price shelf.

  Holborn, Russell Square | 14 Bury Place, WC1A 2JL.
Follow at lrbshop.com • @lrbshop • facebook.com/LondonReviewBookshop.

Filed under: bookish posts Tagged: a tour of london bookshops

There's a smart, funny read on The Cut right now that gives the overuse of the word "curvy" as a descriptor for All Types of Women a good talking-to. Lauren Bans takes on the fashion and entertainment media's exhaustive use of the term in all situations involving females, citing loads of examples, and shows how, when used so liberally, the word begins to lose all meaning. To wit: More »

Brush off those anti-abortion bingo cards you set aside after last month's election, because Texas Governor Rick Perry just spewed out an alarming yet depressingly predictable bevy of buzzwords during a press conference organized by Texas Right to Life at a crisis pregnancy center today. (In Perry's dream Texas, cpcs would replace legitimate women's health clinics that provide, refer for or even vaguely "promote" abortions. Also the star on the state flag would be replaced with an embryo shedding a single tear.) More »

Lone Star lawmakers only seem to be realizing that now that their 2011 decision to relocate $73,000 worth of funds from family planning services in order to stop the cash flow to Planned Parenthood might result in a skyrocketing birth rate and a back-asswards ripple effect on the state's finances, said The New York Times yesterday: Texas' Health and Human Services Commission has estimated that during 2014-2015, around 23,760 more babies will be born to women in poverty who will need care under Medicaid, costing taxpayers $273 million and the state $103 million to $108 million. More »

Here at Open Culture, we can’t resist the RSA Animate video series, created by the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce. Its twitchy but supernaturally precise hand has illustrated talks by Daniel Pink, Sir Ken Robinson, Barbara Ehrenreich, Slavoj Žižek, Steven Pinker, and Dan Ariely. This newest RSA Animate production may provide you an introduction not just to a rising thinker, but to a new concept. “Writer on the art of living” Roman Krznaric, accompanied by the quick drawing of Andrew Park, wants to tell you about something called “outrospection.” Consider it less an entirely new practice than a fresh way of thinking about how to develop an old human capacity: empathy. He finds empathy not a “nice, soft, fluffy social concept,” but something powerful and potentially dangerous, a fuel for revolutions of all kinds.

For an example of empathy that looks to him proto-outrospective, Krznaric cites George Orwell, author of 1984 and Animal Farm. His plunge into the world of urban poverty — the deepest kind of first-hand research — to write Down and Out in Paris and London, coming to know, befriend, and work alongside the down-and-out themselves, makes him “one of the great empathic adventurers of the 20th century.” This line of thought connects Orwell’s active social curiosity to empathy as a potentially collective force; we even hear a call for new, empathy-oriented social institutions like a “human library” with actual people available for illuminating conversations. Empathy, to Krznaric’s mind, will only become more important in the 21st century, and those of us who can master outrospection, the skill of “discovering who we are by stepping outside ourselves and exploring the lives of other people and cultures,” will fare best there. If after the video you still find yourself confused about how best to engage in outrospection, don’t worry: Krznaric writes an entire blog on the subject.

via Science Dump

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.

The Power of “Outrospection” — A Way of Life, A Force for Social Change — Explained with Animation is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and by Email.

Oh my fuck, this is the saddest thing, not to mention positively Dourtney-esque: Kim Kardashian's four-month-old teacup Persian, Mercy has died. After discovering she was allergic to cats, Kardashian had passed Mercy on to Khloé Kardashian Odom's assistant, Sydney Hitchcock, whose 12-year-old cat had just died. All was well until November 26, when Mercy was rushed to the vet with a fatal stomach infection. Nothing was going to save her, so she was euthanized. Kardashian writes on her blog: More »

Andy & Josh

I love how today’s engagement photos are relaxed and beautiful with a retro twist! What a fun way to spend a day. Two Girls with a Camera ( Georgia and Morganna) captured the engagement of Andy & Josh and said, “Sometimes you’re faced with a couple so in love you just have to stand back and hope you can capture it in a photo. Josh and Andy were one of those couples. With their country wedding coming up in March we thought it would be fun to do an engagement shoot. When you are around these two they radiate fun and warmth with their infectious laughter. We decided to make the shoot a family affair with dogs Rambo and Bobbi making a cameo”

Josh and Andy tell their story. “Josh and Andy met through a mutual friend. He was away working in the country and Andy heard all about him before they even met, she knew he played beautiful guitar, painted lovely pictures and was smart like a boss. It was no surprise she fell for him once she saw those baby blues. They had dumplings on their first date.”

“Josh and Andy have two furry children, Bobby and Rambo, the pups, who they take everywhere with them. Jokingly nicknamed boofhead and pinhead the cheeky duo reign supreme over their household. It is lord of the flies and the chihuahua rules the roost.”

“Andy loves Josh’s quiet way, an old school gentleman of honest heart. She loves his blue eyes and that mop of curly hair. Josh loves Andy’s sense of humour, how she can go from being teary-eyed and sentimental to wise-cracking in the space of five minutes. She has moods like Melbourne’s weather and that’s ok with Josh.”

“Andy’s dad was cutting vegetables in the garden with a HUGE knife one Christmas when Josh thought it would be good timing to go and ask him for his daughter’s hand in marriage. Luckily her dad was delighted to say of course. Josh got down on bended knee and proposed with his grandmother’s ring. ”

Photographer: Two Girls With A Camera Photographer: Two Girls With A Camera

Want More? Check Out These Posts:

1. Carley and Joe’s Relaxed Maleny Engagement Photos
2. Terri & Michael’s Relaxed Swan Valley Engagement Photos
3. Joanne and Josh’s Abbotsford Convent Engagement Photos

As one Metafilter commenter put it, this visualization is cool and creepy at once. Assembled by Brad Flyon, the visualization gives you a feel for the qualitative rhythm of births and deaths in the U.S.. (Fortunately the births exceed deaths by a significant margin.) When you enter the visualization, you’ll want to give things a few moments to get going. And you can mouse over parts of the map to get more data.

The visualization itself was created with the following (and I’m quoting Flyon verbatim here):

• The 2010 population data for “Places” from US Census, which contains census information for about 30,000 “places” (cities, towns, census designated places, etc.) in the US
• The 2010 population data for US counties
• An annual birth rate of 13.5 births per thousand from page 67 of the U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2012
• An annual death rate of 8.1 deaths per thousand from page 81 of the U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2012

Watch a Cool and Creepy Visualization of U.S. Births & Deaths in Real-Time is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and by Email.