The Illustrated History of How Sugar Conquered the World
The story of the world’s most influential flavour, year by year, picture by picture. From its beginnings in India as a man made alternative to bees, sold as acure; the Arabs used it in cooking and made marzipan, the crusaders brought back sugar manufacturing to Europe; the colonization of the American continent brings cheap labor and good land for sugarcane growing; during the 17th century over half a million African slaves worked on sugar plantations; 1747 Andrea S. Margraff discovers that sucrose can be derived from beets… “If you want to understand Western history, you have to understand sugar. And vice versa. Because sugar’s not just something sweet: over the centuries it’s been a medicine, a spice, a symbol of royalty, and an instrument of disease, addiction, and oppression.”
https://www.saveur.com/sugar-history-of-the-world/
Russet, the Color of Peasants, Fox Fur, and Penance
On the nature and history of the hue called Russet, a mix of washed-up red and brown, the color of protestant peasants, late autumn and Dutch painters. “Russet is the color of November in Maine. The color that emerges when all the more spectacular leaves have fallen: the yellow coins of the white birch, the big, hand-shaped crimson leaves of the red maple, the papery pumpkin-hued spears of the beech trees. The oaks are always the last to shed their plumage, and their leaves are the dullest color. They’re the darkest, the closest to brown. But if you pay attention, you’ll see that they’re actually quite pretty.”
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/10/20/russet-the-color-of-peasants-fox-fur-and-penance/
How an English Energy Crisis Helped Create Champagne
Did you know that Christopher Merrett, an English polymath is the first person to describe the process of making sparkling wine and the English were the first to use the more efficient coal in the glass making process? The English became the inventors of the champagne bottle after their country was running low on wood and a proclamation was issued to forbid the use of wood for the glass making process.“ In a standard bottle of sparkling wine today, the internal pressure is at around six times that of atmospheric pressure—three times that of a car tire. That’s the equivalent to more than five kilograms of weight pushing hard against every square centimeter of glass. Only an especially strong bottle could withstand this sort of pressure. Thankfully, England’s glass-makers were prepared.”
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/history-of-champagne
The difficult pleasures of William Gaddis
A great review of the rerelease of the novels “The Recognitions” and “JR” by William Gaddis , both must reads. “For someone like Gaddis, who despised the cult of the artist, who cared immensely about his work and not at all about his reputation, being known without being read might be a worse fate than not being known at all.” “Readers have often understood The Recognitions’ obsession with counterfeiting as a familiar Fifties critique of American phoniness. “Peel away the erudition,” Jonathan Franzen wrote about the novel, “and you have ‘The Catcher in the Rye.’ ” But Gaddis makes clear throughout that he is after bigger, more interesting game; his real target is not fakery but something like its opposite, what a teacher of Wyatt’s calls “that romantic disease, originality””
https://harpers.org/archive/2020/11/because-god-did-not-relax-william-gaddis/
The curious case of Romanian broadband
My home country’s cityscapes are usually hard to picture without the intricate network of cables linked to telephone poles. Tese wirings had their origins in 1990s local area networks that were adopted per neighbourhood, even if they were illegal based on these early wirings the broadband commercial networks had a solid base to build on and achieve the third fastest broadband internet speed in the world . “Despite the drawbacks, the regulatory leniency also had its benefits. When the commercial Internet started to take hold in the late 1990s, it piggybacked off of these local small Internet service providers to create superfast networks. Simultaneously, Romania lacked a robust telephone market, and so instead of upgrading telephone services through DSL, Romanians jumped directly into fiber through these neighborhood networks..”
https://medium.com/cgo-benchmark/the-curious-case-of-romanian-broadband-c58291b2fcda
If you think someone dear to you would enjoy this newsletter, than please share by clicking to button bellow
Video Pill
The History of Flash Games
Why You Should Turn On Two Factor Authentication
Let Me Tell You Why That's Funny: Always Sunny and Waiting For Godot
Podcast Pill
Why The Browser moved from Substack to Ghost with Uri Bram, Podcast: Newsletter crew
Uri Bram, a publisher at The Browser, which is literally the number one curation based newsletter on the internet today. Featured topics: The Browser moved from Substack over to Ghost, how they were able still be around after 10 years, their pricing plans, and so much more.
Ben Macintyre with Nihal Arthanayake, Podcast: The Penguin
Author and historian Ben Macintyre talks to Nihal about his new book ‘Agent Sonya’ - the story of the greatest female spy of the 20th Century.
https://player.fm/series/the-penguin-podcast/ben-macintyre-with-nihal-arthanayake
Design Pill
Dracula Motherf__cker cover art by Yuko Shimizu
Poetic Pill
Already I, by Choi Seungja
“Already I was nothing:
mold formed on stale bread,
trail of piss stains on the wall,
a maggot-covered corpse
a thousand years old.
Nobody raised me.
I was nothing from the beginning,
sleeping in a rat’s hole,
nibbling on the flea’s liver,
dying absentmindedly. in any old place.
So don’t say you know me
when we cross paths
like falling stars.
Idon’tknowyou, Idon’tknowyou,
You, thou, there, Happiness,
You, thou, there, Love.
That I am alive
is no more than an endless
rumor.“
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/10/20/deaths-traffic-light-blinks-red/
Underground Pill
Black Thought - State Prisoner
“The king been coronated, wake up
No masquerade, remove the make-up
It's no sleep, but my eyes refuse to stay shut
It's gatekeeper's responsible for this place
But historically, the authorities been morally bankrupt
Enter the executioner, speaking of retribution
I will send shots to Lucifer even to catch the future
Me and the best producers out again, en route again
Airborne audio spores, it's like an allergen, so
In conclusion, I wanna clear the confusion
Any rumors the artist you're currently hearin' is human
The shapeshifter, weightlifter, I hate Hitler
I'm the great victor behind the bars, state prisoner“
Dictionary Pill
brisk = active and energetic(adjective); quicken something(verb)
Thank you for reading, please feel free to leave a comment on the page.
If you are not a subscriber, then click on the button bellow, in order to to receive your Curiosity Pill each week!