Kickoff For July 7, 2025
Yep, I missed last week’s letter. A lot of reasons for that, but mostly fatigue-induced forgetfulness. It’s been a busy couple of weeks ...
With that out of the way, let's get Monday started with these links:
The Dark Side of the Moomins — Wherein we learn that the stories about the cuddly, hippo-like creatures aren't ones of growth and self discovery but actually reflect some of the darkness experienced by their creator Tove Jansson, and how her creations took over Jansson's life.
From the article:
Jansson, like the Moomins, wanted only to hibernate but instead she found herself snowed in beneath “an avalanche of things”, her world now composed, she said, of “newspapers, telephones, telegrams, post post post in heaps, stacks, avalanches, strangers, lectures, conversations, conversations, masses of words and myriads of children. And never alone. Never ever really alone”.
Regime Change in the West? — Wherein Perry Anderson looks at neoliberal policies and how they've evolved, at the populist push back against neoliberalism and how that push back is changing both national and international orders.
From the article:
That so many arrows remain missing in the quiver of serious opposition to the status quo is not, of course, just the fault of today’s populisms. It reflects the intellectual contraction of the left in its long years of retreat since the 1970s, and the sterility in that time of what were once original strands of thought at the edges of the mainstream.
Polaroid Death Machine — Wherein Mike Scalise explores what instant photography meant to his family and explains the personal (and sometimes tragic) reasons why he continues to snap pictures with old Polaroid cameras.
From the article:
When I came home from my Polaroid walks I scarcely shared them online. Instead, I annotated them, as my grandmother did. Date / location / short description. Then I slid them into albums—my Polaroid diary—and enjoyed thinking of a future person as I did, someone nameless, who didn’t know me or my experience.
The Wisconsin cartographer who mapped Tolkien’s fantasy world — Wherein we learn about the work of Karen Wynn Fonstad who, in the 1970s and 1980s, created beautiful and detailed maps of all things Middle Earth, and learn about the efforts of her family to preserve and digitize those maps.
From the article:
As we walk into the map library, we are surrounded by Middle-earth. Mordor, the Shire and all points in between are represented. And not just Middle-earth. Karen created works for other fantasy worlds — some never published.
What Do You Remember? — Wherein Joshua Rothman looks at personal memories, and what and how we choose to pull those reminiscenes of the past from deep (or not-so-deep) in our brains.
From the article:
[S]uch memories can enlarge the scope of your past. They can increase your sense of temporal expansiveness, reminding you of just how much you’ve seen and done, of how long you’ve lived, of where you were and who you were. And so, strangely, random memories can become relevant to the expanded version of you that remembering creates. The more you remember, the deeper your sense of yourself becomes.
The Rise of Scotland Yard in Victorian England — Wherein we're taken back to the early days of London's police modern department and discover how Scotland Yard innovated police work by developing various policing and investigative techniques.
From the article:
Scientific and forensic attempts made elsewhere were taken, used, and refined. The study of ballistics, of using blood hounds to track and identify evidence (and criminals!), blood spatter and blood stain analysis, as well as toxicology. The modern Victorian home was a quagmire of poison waiting for its next victim, from the arsenic used in fashionable wallpaper and clothing to the white lead powder contained in cosmetics, and police had to discern accidental poisoning from intentional poisoning.