J. R. R. Tolkien managed to write the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which ought to be accomplishment enough for one mortal. But he also wrote the The Hobbit, the gateway for generations of children into his major work, as well as a host of other works of fiction, poetry, and scholarship, many of them not published until after his death in 1973. And those are only his writings: a lifelong artist, Tolkien also produced a great many drawings and paintings, book-cover designs, and pictures meant to delight his own children as well as the children of others.

Yet somehow more material has remained in the vault, and only now brought out for proper public consideration. As reported earlier this month by Artnet's Sarah Cascone, Tolkien's estate "has released a new website featuring artworks, some previously unseen," all created by the man himself.

"In addition to a number of detailed maps, the estate has released illustrations Tolkien created for The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion, as [...]

The Library of Alexandria has been physically gone for about eighteen centuries now, but the institution endures as a powerful symbol. Today we have the internet, which none can deny is at least well on its way to becoming a digital store of all human knowledge. But despite having emerged from an ever more enormously complex technological infrastructure, the internet is difficult to capture in a legible mental picture. The Library of Alexandria, by contrast, actually stood in Egypt for some 300 years after its commissioning by Ptolemy I and II, and early in the second century B.C. it bid fair to hold practically all written knowledge in existence within its walls (and those of its "daughter library" the Serapeum, constructed when the main building ran out of space).

Interesting enough as a lost work of ancient architecture, the Library of Alexandria is remembered for its contents — not that history has been able to remember in much detail what those contents actually were. "Some ancient authors claimed that it contained 700,000 books," says ancient-history scholar Garret Ryan in [...]

I’ve been thinking lately about how and why utopian fiction shades into dystopian. Though we sometimes imagine the two modes as inversions of each other, perhaps they lie instead on a continuum, one along which all societies slide, from functional to dysfunctional. The central problem seems to be this: Utopian thought relies on putting the complications of human behavior on the shelf to make a maximally efficient social order---or of finding some convenient way to dispense with those complications. But it is precisely with this latter move that the trouble begins. How to make the mass of people compliant and pacific? Mass media and consumerism? Forced collectivization? Drugs?

Readers of dystopian fiction will recognize these as some of the design flaws in Aldous Huxley’s utopian/dystopian society of Brave New World, a novel that asks us to wrestle with the philosophical problem of whether we can create a fully functional society without robbing people of their agency and independence. Doesn’t every utopia, after all, imagine a world of strict hierarchies and controls? The original---Thomas More’s Utopia---gave us a patriarchal slave society (as did [...]

Cross cat napping with bed hopping and you might end up having an “adventure in comfort” similar to the one that informs student Yuri Nakahashi's thesis for Tokyo’s Hosei University.

For 24 consecutive nights, Nakahashi forwent the comforts of her own bed in favor of a green sleeping bag, unfurled in whatever random location one of her five pet cats had chosen as its sleeping spot that evening.

(The choice of which cat would get the pleasure of dictating each night's sleeping bag coordinates was also randomized.)

As the owner of five cats, Nakahashi presumably knew what she was signing up for...

Cats rack out atop sofa backs, on stairs, and under beds…and so did Nakahashi.

Her photos suggest she logged a lot of time on a bare wooden floor.

A FitBit monitored the duration and quality of time spent asleep, as well as the frequency with which she awakened [...]

According to The Guardian, the surviving members of The Clash have given their blessing to the Ukrainian punk band, Beton, to record a new version of their 1979 classic London Calling. Recorded near the frontline of the battle in Ukraine, Kyiv Calling (above) "has lyrics that call upon the rest of the world to support the defence of the country from Russian invaders. All proceeds of what is now billed as a 'war anthem' will go to the Free Ukraine Resistance Movement (FURM) to help fund a shared communications system that will alert the population to threats and lobby for international support."

You can donate to the Free Ukraine Resistance Movement here.

via BoingBoing

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