In order to understand the way that I love, you’d have to hear all my stories on how others have impacted the way that I’m now able to feel. You’ll start to believe then, that humans can be beautiful too.
- Elmgreen & Dragset Pace Gallery
Discover more must-see displays: tinyurl.com/2u4y7bwy
“What is life but an unpleasant interruption to a peaceful nonexistence.”
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
For 99 percent of the tenure of humans on earth, nobody could read or write. The great invention had not yet been made.
Except for firsthand experience, almost everything we knew was passed on by word of mouth. As in the children’s game
“Telephone,” over tens and hundreds of generations, information would slowly be distorted and lost.
Books changed all that. Books, purchasable at low cost, permit us to interrogate the past with high accuracy; to tap the wisdom of our species; to understand the point of view of others, and not just those in power; to contemplate-with the best teachers - the insights, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, drawn from the entire planet and from all of our history. They allow people long dead to talk inside our heads. Books can accompany us everywhere. Books are patient where we are slow to understand, allow us to go over the hard parts as many times as we wish, and are never critical of our lapses. Books are key to understanding the world and participating in a democratic society. ~Carl Sagan
(Book: The Demon-Haunted World https://amzn.to/3zbNhEy [ad])
Just dropped some new material 🔊🔊
Recording a concert before cell phones
Unraveling the Palenque Astronaut Enigma. Deep within Palenque’s archaeological treasures resides an enigmatic figure on the lid of Pakal the Great’s sarcophagus—a depiction that intrigues many as a possible representation of an ancient astronaut in a spacecraft. This curious portrayal has spurred discussions and contemplations around the concept of extraterrestrial encounters with the advanced Mayan civilization. Might this imagery serve as a clue to an ancient civilization’s interactions with beings from beyond Earth’s realm?
(via grlbts)
“Imagine a society in which intellectuals are free to write anything they want but it is forbidden to sell magazines or books. Under these peculiar circumstances, intellectuals would technically be free, but their freedom wouldn’t be worth much. Now imagine a society in which intellectuals are still free but the overwhelming majority of the society’s members—their intended readers, who desperately need the truths the intellectuals have to offer—are tired and stressed, have very little spare money for books or free time to read, are continually distracted by gaudy and often sexualized advertisements in every medium, did not receive a high-quality education, and have internalized the society’s dominant ethic of competitive individualism rather than cooperative solidarity. These are not, unfortunately, peculiar circumstances but pretty much the way things are in the United States and have been for the last forty years. Under these circumstances the freedom of intellectuals is, again, not worth much.”
(via vortexanomaly)