M.J. Rose

Neil Gaiman spoke about stories recently in San Francisco. Enjoy!

Neil Gaiman on How Stories Last
by Maria Popova (Brain Pickings)

“Stories … are genuinely symbiotic organisms that we live with, that allow human beings to advance.”

“Stories have shapes, as Vonnegut believed, and they in turn give shape to our lives. But how do stories like the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm or Alice in Wonderland continue to enchant the popular imagination generation after generation — what is it that makes certain stories last?

That’s what the wise and wonderful Neil Gaiman explores in a fantastic lecture two and a half years in the making, part of the Long Now Foundation’s nourishing and necessary seminars on long-term thinking.

Nearly half a century after French molecular biologist Jacques Monod proposed what he called the “abstract kingdom” — a conceptual parallel to the biosphere, populated by ideas that propagate like organisms do in the natural world — and after Richard Dawkins built upon this concept to coin the word “meme,” Gaiman suggests stories are a life-form obeying the same rules of genesis, reproduction, and propagation that organic matter does…”

The audio for the talk is here, or click the image below.

See the rest, as well as transcribed highlights here.

These are just fantastic!

Cold War dollhouses from the Socialist paradise of East Germany

(Dangerous Minds)

“The Flickr user diepuppenstubensammlerin (the name means “the dollhouse collector”) has a remarkably wide-ranging and detailed series of galleries documenting dollhouses from Germany, with many of the sets pictured dating from the 1950s through the 1970s. The set pictured here came from a company called VEB Grünhainichen, if I understand correctly, and it was in East Germany, in fact on the border to what was then called Czechoslovakia.

The notion of children playing with dollhouses that have this kitschy wallpaper and kitchen tiles or tasteful/chintzy furniture of indubitably modern design. All you need is a Trabant driving by outside or the tones of the Klaus Renft Combo emanating from the hi-fi system and the picture is complete…”

For the rest, click .

We are constantly both amused and amazed by the fact that reality is consistently proving to be even more magical than magic. As science progresses, the schism between the known and the unknown, the impossible and the provable, becomes smaller and smaller…

From Science Alert,