Please remember that the disgust people have over Christopher Columbus is not based on some modern, 21st century “woke” ideology, but rather on contemporaneous accounts of atrocities that make many modern genocides appear quaint in comparison. Below, are the accounts of Bartlomé de las Casas.

Wow, this is the view on the Himalayas from Jainagar (India). The mountain chain is 150 km away and still beautifully visible - I’m sure this was a particularly clear day but it’s a truly wonderful sight. Source: buff.ly/aTj63aD

Antiquity-ass headline

Autonomy presumes one person’s freedom not to understand another. Richard Sennett remarks: “Rather than an equality of understanding, autonomy means accepting in the other what you do not understand, an opaque equality.” Byung-Chul Han, The Transparency Society

A dhow built by the inhabitants of Grande Comore ca. 1855 #archivesxt

“I don’t see why a man should take thirty pages to describe how he turns over in his bed before he goes to sleep.” A publisher rejecting Proust. Every academic - “Can you really do that properly in a mere 30 pages?”

Fun fact: the conquest of Babylon by Cyrus the Great (539 BCE) pretty much marks the halfway point of recorded history so far. Everything since—the Persian Empire, Alexander, Romans, Middle Ages of course—is closer to us than to the first invention of writing.

Interesting connection between Camus and Proust - not that one! It’s wild that French literature only took one generation to go from Proust (that one) to Camus. I love them both but they could hardly be more different. (Quote from Robert Zaretsky’s ‘Victories Never Last’)

ㅤ Boy and Moon — Edward Hopper, 1906 ㅤ

Photography is really perception. As with all art, the objective of photography is not the duplication of visual reality, but an investigation of the outer world and its influence on the inner world.... All of my photographs are photographs of myself. - Ansel Adams

Skull of Zurbaran https://botfrens.com/collections/63/contents/20997

“In 1004, the Byzantine Maria Argyropoulina (985–1007), sister of Emperor Romanos III Argyros, married the son of the Doge of Venice and scandalized the city by refusing to eat with her fingers.” A millennia ago Venetians ate how Indians largely eat today. phys.org/news/2025-09...

you can say what you want in footnotes, no-one is gonna read it

Mandarin sentence of the day: 你今天真好看。 nǐ jīn tiān zhēn hǎo kàn you to-day really good-looking

William Connell, California, 1935

I am here to remind BBC athletics commentators that people from Botswana are called Motswana (singular) or Batswana (plural).

More than 774 athletes have been killed by Israeli forces since Oct. 7, 2023, including at least 355 footballers. Their are also 119 missing athletes & 288 destroyed sports facilities. How is Israel still allowed to compete in global sports? www.sportspolitika.news/p/israel-spo...

The elephant in the room....🐘🐘🐘🐘🐘🐘 Bodleian Library Arch. G b.6; Historia naturale di Caio Plinio Secondo, tradocta di lingua latina in fiorentina per Christophoro Landino; 1476 CE; Italy (Venice); f.93v @bodleian.ox.ac.uk

I come with empty hands and the desire to unbuild walls.

Monument 3 (locally known as El Dios del Mundo, the God of the Earth), El Baúl, the south coast of Guatemala, 1958. From “Incidents of travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatán” by John Stephens.

Chamber of Commerce in Vercelli, designed by Enrico Villani (1966-72), Italy

If you thought there were a lot of obasans in Japan, woman 65 and older make up 32.4% of the female population. So you were right.

Some of the standing stones that forms the Stones of Stenness on Orkney. The Neolithic monument dates to around 3100 – 2900 BC, and is part of the ‘Heart of Neolithic Orkney World Heritage Site’. 📸 My own. #StandingStoneSunday #Prehistory #Stenness #Orkney

The earliest surviving photographs of Japan were shot by Eliphalet Brown as part of the Perry Expedition in 1853/54. Among many landscapes, Brown also took a few portraits, including this anonymous Buddhist priest at Shimoda – likely the earliest surviving photo of a Buddhist cleric.🧵 🗃️ 📜 #Japan

Nobody means by a word precisely what his neighbour does, and the difference, be it ever so small, vibrates, like a ripple in water, throughout the entire language. Thus all understanding is always at the same time a not-understanding, all concurrence in thought …a divergence. —Wilhelm von Humboldt

“The human race is a strange mixture of the divine and the diabolic, both equally real, making both good and evil inevitable. Complete despair is no more rational than blind optimism.” On keeping a wide horizon - Bertrand Russell (1979) mulpress.mcmaster.ca/russelljourn...

Tonight I will read for pleasure and not for work. Tonight I will read for pleasure and not for work. Tonight I will read for pleasure and not for work. Tonight I will read for pleasure and not for work. Tonight I will read for pleasure and not for work.

I give you drunkenness upon drunkenness and delight without end to it. (WWO)

Large cylindrical grain silos with thatched roofs in Manchuria, 1920s. Japan turned soybeans into an imperial resource: Manchurian harvests fed its population and industries. This dependency set the stage for the 1931 Mukden Incident and Japan’s takeover of Manchuria.

Silver head of Sasanian (Persian) king, Shapur II (309-379) at the MET Shapur II fought the Romans (under Constantius II and other emperors) for many years; Julian died in 363 after fighting the Sasanian Persians.

you've read your last free article (the grim reaper)

Lamp-filler (guttus) in the form of a satyr second half of 4th century B.C. Place of Manufacture: Italy, Apulia (MFA, Boston)

New Tyne Bridge, Newcastle upon Tyne, 1925, photo by E.O. Hoppé, German-born British photographer (1878-1972).

Marvellously preserved pre-Incan temple mural discovered in Peru last month hyperallergic.com/1035297/arch...

Videogames are a waste of time. But so is your job.

"In 1642 in the town of Lemgo, Germany, local pharmacist David Welman was accused of witchcraft and being a werewolf. Anonymous hate mail was sent to him, one of which included this sketch."

“we are never real historians, but always near poets” (Gaston Bachelard)

Sound advice from an early 16thC French Speculum Principis: "Speak Not Against the Sun" and "Do Not Make Water Facing the Sun" [fol. 39 recto], c. 1512/1515. (National Gallery of Art, Washington)

Clouds in the west laid great shivering mirages on the plain, the shadows of dreams of lakes gone dry ten million years ago.

we stand for the flag in this house

The Dutch secret service set up a fake Maoist party in the late 1960s and kept it going for decades. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxist...

I recently became acquainted with "Osanaetoki Bankokubanashi" 童絵解万国噺, a Japanese illustrated history of America from 1861. The retelling of the revolutionary era is quite something. Here, for instance, is John Adams wielding a sword in mortal combat with a gigantic serpent.

Fu Baoshi Electric Power Lines

51. The “printing revolution” was a conspiracy invented by (largely Protestant) printers to sell more print.

Mephisto, by Joaquín Espalter y Rull, 1872, 📸 by Stu Forster

The witch trials of 1612 still cast a long shadow.