Ornament is amazingly pervasive across time and space. To the best of my knowledge, every premodern architectural culture normally applied ornament to high-status structures like temples, palaces, and public buildings. Although vernacular buildings like barns and cottages were sometimes unornamented, what is striking is how far down the prestige spectrum ornament reached: our ancestors ornamented bridges, power stations, factories, warehouses, sewage works, fortresses, and office blocks. From Chichen Itza to Bradford, from Kyiv to Lalibela, from Toronto to Tiruvannamalai, ornament was everywhere.
Since the Second World War, this has changed profoundly. For the first time in history, many high-status buildings have little or no ornament. Although a trained eye will recognize more ornamental features in modern architecture than laypeople do, as a broad generalization it is obviously true that we ornament major buildings far less than most architectural cultures did historically. This has been celebrated by some and lamented by others. But it is inarguable that it has greatly changed the face of all modern settlements. To the extent that we care about how our towns and cities look, it is of enormous importance.
While this seems to be a minor issue here, it could be a problem in the long term. The more people feel that they can reject evidence as a matter of opinion, the more it opens the door to what the authors describe as "the rise of 'post-truth' politics and the dissemination of 'alternative facts.'" And that has the potential to undercut the acceptance of science in a wide variety of contexts.
A symptom of transformation is obsession: with yourself, with Meaning, with other people who look like Meaning. In All Fours, a funny and deliciously indulgent novel about changing course in midlife as an artist, wife, and mother, Miranda July writes with knowing depth about this kind of spiraling figurative masturbation. (She also writes about the literal kind.)
These are indeed our fine feathered friends, their adventures gripping as they face severe human-made dangers—gripping because Terese Svoboda has made what happens to such beings meaningful and important.
You stuff your biggest tote bag to the brim with all the beach gear you’re gonna need: towel, sunscreen, second sunscreen for your face, hat, water bottle, umbrella, the weird little folding camping chair that may or may not work.
The bag’s getting pretty full… Is there even room for a book?
Recent writing about perception by neuroscientists and philosophers has tended toward a disconcerting message: we have nothing like the simple, direct contact with the world around us that we might suppose. Instead, we are told, our brains actively synthesize a picture of the world, continually guessing, extrapolating, and projecting. Stronger versions of this view hold that what we perceive is a kind of simulation or model—not one imposed on us by some malevolent being but one we fashion ourselves. The simulation is constrained by physical stimuli from the environment—from something outside us, anyway—but the constraint can be tenuous, and ordinary perception may be akin to a “controlled hallucination,” as the neuroscientist Anil Seth has argued.
Against this background, it’s interesting to read two recent books by science writers—Sentient by Jackie Higgins and An Immense World by Ed Yong—that describe, among other things, the sometimes astounding detail with which our senses mediate our contact with the world. The senses of many animals, including ourselves, could hardly be more finely tuned to what goes on around us.