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The archive
Ideas · Essay
Carts, church bells, barking dogs and leaf blowers. Every generation believes it is the first to be denied its quiet.
Culture · Archives
…find any of this moving. What she finds it is necessary. This is the Coastal Lights Oral History Project, and for three years it has been doing two things at once, against two different clocks. The first is…
Ideas · Memory
…man. He was making the judgment his profession made almost everywhere in his time: that the history worth keeping was the history of institutions and the people who ran them, and the rest was clutter. The result…
Ideas · Essay
…and no conclusion; it is the same Tuesday, over and over, for 31 years. Nobody writes the history of a bridge’s 40th repainting. We write the history of its construction and, if things go badly, of its collapse,…
Science · Evolution
…question evolutionary biologists like to argue about over drinks: if you could rewind the history of life and play it again, would anything come out the same? No one can rerun the history of life, but you can…
Culture · Museums
…the thing never leaves. The third strange thing is the book. Every small museum has one: a history of the building, usually written by a retired volunteer, usually with a foreword by someone who once chaired the…
Ideas · Essay
…quite sure the check will clear. The older idea It was not always so. For long stretches of history, and in more than one tradition, the relation ran the other way: work existed for the sake of leisure, not leisure…
Politics · Borders
…on hers. Kavan moved the newspapers. Visits that month were the highest in the library’s history. It is tempting to turn the library into a parable, and the people who use it mostly decline to. To them it is…
Politics · Water
…something like 150 million crowns, and the bill raises a question that, for most of the city’s history, nobody needed to ask: whose pipes are they? The answer, it turns out, also explains why the records were wrong.…
Culture · Books
…Callender said, with real affection. “And he is never once alive. ‘Retained.’ Nobody in the history of the world has felt anything about the word ‘retained.’” His is the edition still assigned in classrooms, and…