NB! · Cinema · Observations · Humour

"Inside Out 2", as it would be shot inside my head

Books · Observations · Society

Never has our future been so unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest…

Hannah Arendt

Cinema · Monarchies · Observations

BBC and CBS Studios Are Working on a Drama Series About William the Conqueror

Starring: Nikolaj Coster-Waldau as William the Conqueror, founder of the Anglo-Norman kingdom, and James Norton as King Harold Godwinson, the last crowned Anglo-Saxon king of England. Roll on 1066

NB! · Observations

What an Overwhelming Concentration of Beauty Looks Like

Old engraving of two men operating on the head of a patient seated in a chair, with a sick person lying in bed in the room behind.

Books · Observations · Science · Humour

Trepanation in the practice of the 16th-century Spanish physician Franciscus Arceus

Dreadful, dreadful, dreadful medicine of the past. What bliss to live in the twentieth century. And, in part, the twenty-first. Trepanation by the sixteenth-century Spanish physician Francisco Arceo

NB! · Art · Observations

Which Van Dyck Would You Prefer?

Observations · Society

In France There Will Be No Laws or Values Other Than French Ones

Marine Le Pen One would like to believe it

NB! · Observations · Pop Culture

I consider this mask an item of the first necessity this summer

Old tinted photograph of two mountaineers with ice axes on a glacier slope, the upper one holding out a hand to the lower.

NB! · Archive · Observations

Photograph of two mountaineers with ice axes taken in 1900

Two mountaineers in 1900. Every time I see photos like this, I am struck by how much the world has changed in a mere hundred years.

NB! · Observations · Education

Congratulations to all students and teachers on the official end of the academic year!

A mesh LED panel with blue, red and green lights on a facade, seen from below, with white ventilation pipes and glass structures behind.

Architecture · Observations · Society · Paris

The author criticises national culture becoming a backdrop for corporate interests

The façade of the Centre Pompidou has been entirely covered in LED strips, creating a vast canvas for Nike advertising. It is dreadful when national culture becomes nothing more than a backing for corporate interests

Archive · Books · Observations

Now you know that Jane Austen wrote cross-hatched letters

Any thoughts as to why? This kind of letter was widespread in the early days of the postal service: crossed writing was used to reduce the number of sheets and to lighten the envelopes