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"The public galleries are just the crust, the thin outer layer. These rooms are dotted with locked doors, barely noticed by the visiting public. Look out, next time you pass through, for discreet labels stuck to some of these doors, showing an illustration of a lion in profile. It is museum code for “evacuate me urgently in case of fire or flood” and means you are passing a storeroom. The symbol, it dawned on me this autumn, when I spotted a version made from glazed earthenware on display in gallery 47, derives from a set of 19th-century iron lions that adorned the building’s railings until they were removed in 1895. Only a museum could invent a code so arcane, so historically self-referential."

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2025/jan/16/the-ghosts-are-everywhere-can-the-british-museum-survive-its-omni-crisis

Reminds me of the Hague Convention Blue Shield.

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a friend just tipped me off about Fund a Kitchen in Gaza, a free tool that helps you locate and donate to community kitchens currently serving some of Gaza's most vulnerable!

this lets you choose a region (south, central, north) and see which kitchens operate in that area, then donate to as many as you can.

as a reminder, community kitchens try to buy and cook in bulk, which makes ingredients last longer & sustain more people in the conditions of extreme scarcity that Israel is imposing right now. they are also able to serve people on the ground who may not have the means to reach out online.

so, whether through this tool or not, please do support community kitchens, as well as mutual aid groups that cover additional needs, such as the Sameer Project (meals, tents, cash aid, medical aid) and Dahnoun Mutual Aid (meals, tents, baby supplies, cash aid, winter clothes).

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"sadopopulism: a politics that works not because all benefit but because some learn to take pleasure in the greater suffering of others."

Class War or Culture War? - Timothy Snyder

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Beautifully-observed & realistic figure of a sleeping Antelope incised on rock up to 10,000 years ago at Tin Taghirt, Tassili n'Ajjer in Algeria, one of the largest & most important groupings of prehistoric cave art in the world.

ph: Linus Wolf

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Shiro Kuramata - 64 Book Shelves, 1972 (Medium density fiber conglomerate panels, white matte lacquer finish)

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Satellite images of a horse, pomegranates, and a camel, created from Solar Panel installations in China and Mongolia.

Via @russss@chaos.social.

The Horse image was created in association with Huawei, in a project that also includes agrivoltaics (growing crops between and underneath solar panels):

In the Kubuqi Desert of Inner Mongolia, the State Power Investment Corporation used Huawei's smart PV solution to build a 300 MW solar power station. The power station located in Dalad Banner, an administrative region in Inner Mongolia, boasts 196,000 solar panels that were installed in the pattern of a galloping horse. By the end of 2022, the power station had produced 2.566 billion kWh of green electricity, equivalent to saving 1.027 million tons of coal equivalent and reducing CO2 by 2.56 million tons. The project has also fixed more than 1,000 hectares of sand. The solar panels do far more than just generate electricity. Local residents have been able to plant herbs and shrubs under the panels and cash crops like desert false indigo and Mongolian milk vetch between the arrays. This prevents further erosion of the land between the panel arrays and contributes to wind and sand fixation and ecosystem restoration. This power station serves as a perfect example of how PV can support desertification control, and plans to replicate this success are being made in other desert lands of western China.

Alxa Right Banner, in Mongolia, the location of the Camel design, is a thriving camel business region. Hotan, in Xinjiang, China, is likewise a prominent pomegranate cultivation area.

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Flag of the Eternal League, the militia of radical preacher Thomas Muntzer during the German Peasants' War.

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To be a botanist today is to choose your words carefully. In her new book, The Light Eaters, Zoe Schlanger details the caution with which botanists ascribe intelligence to plants. Some only dare say plants can “sense”—they are like machines receiving stimuli and outputting an appropriate response. Other botanists take a small risk in the eyes of their peers to ascribe plants with “behavior.” There are fewer still who are bold enough to use the word “intelligence” or, audible gasp, “consciousness” to describe the feats that plants achieve; these words put you in an entirely different camp of dubious respectability in the halls of academia. I can respect the desire for precise language in science, but it makes me wonder, why the trepidation? What would it cost if plants were to be considered intelligent? Through her many conversations, Schlanger realized it would cost a lot, perhaps an entire worldview: “Over and over, I saw the debate [over plant intelligence] framed as a dispute over syntax. But it looked to me more of a dispute over worldview. Over the nature of reality. Over what plants were, particularly in contrast to ourselves.” This is perhaps the clearest way of describing what Queer Ecology is: it is the study of living phenomena that would cost us our worldview. And good riddance.

An enchanting worldview: a participant's reflection

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"The Living Mountain", Nan Shepherd

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In 1984 Muji commissioned Haruomi Hosono to compose in-store background music.

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"Theory - the seeing of patterns, showing the forest as well as the trees-theory can be a dew that rises from the earth and collects in the rain cloud and returns to earth over and over. But if it doesn't smell of the earth, it isn't good for the earth."

Adrienne Rich, "Notes Toward a Politics of Location"

https://genius.com/Adrienne-rich-notes-toward-a-politics-of-location-annotated

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In the field the last swallow had lingered late,

balancing in the air like a black ribbon on the sleeve

of autumn.

Nothing else remained. Only the burned houses

smouldering still.

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Vladimir Nabokov: “I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness – in a landscape selected at random – is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern – to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal."

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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arditi_del_Popolo