Minds. Blown.

August 30th, 2011

Kevin Kelly, quoting from Douglas Coupland's biography of Marshall McLuhan:

The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature. — Alfred North Whitehead

I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't believed it. — M.M.

[...]

Marshall describes Margaret Mead bringing several copies of the same book to a Pacific island. The natives had seen books before, but always different books, one copy of each. When they saw copies of the same book, their minds blew.

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The Reluctant Father

September 28th, 2010

Phillip Toledano's delightful, thoughtful photo essay The Reluctant Father is decidedly not just another collection of baby photos by a devoted daddy. Lovely work, and probably not what you imagine it's going to be after the first few images.

Go, see for yourself.1

[Via MetaFilter]

  1. As his site doesn't flag up the idiosyncratic approach it takes to page navigation, let me spell it out for you: you advance to the next image by left-clicking with your mouse, either on an image or on the space to the left of each image. If you want to go back to a previous image, left-click on the 'Back' link that appears at the top left edge of the page, just below the words 'the ANTHROPOLOGiST'. ↩

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The real Na'vi?

March 20th, 2010

Adam Curtis on the changes in the depiction of the Yanomani tribe on BBC TV over the last forty years:

I am fascinated by the way the Yanomamo appear again and again in the BBC film archive. And each time they turn up they play a new role as different Western concerns and ideas about human beings and nature are projected onto them.

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