Search Results for: Smithsonian

Top 5 Longreads of the Week: Texas Monthly, The Wilson Quarterly, Smithsonian Magazine, Chicago magazine, New York Magazine, fiction from Outlook India, and a guest pick from Jessica Misener.

“The Great New England Vampire Panic.” — Abigail Tucker, Smithsonian magazine

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Inside Harvard historian Karen King’s discovery of an ancient papyrus fragment that includes the phrase, “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife’”:

What it does seem to reveal is more subtle and complex: that some group of early Christians drew spiritual strength from portraying the man whose teachings they followed as having a wife. And not just any wife, but possibly Mary Magdalene, the most-mentioned woman in the New Testament besides Jesus’ mother.

The question the discovery raises, King told me, is, ‘Why is it that only the literature that said he was celibate survived? And all of the texts that showed he had an intimate relationship with Magdalene or is married didn’t survive? Is that 100 percent happenstance? Or is it because of the fact that celibacy becomes the ideal for Christianity?’

How this small fragment figures into longstanding Christian debates about marriage and sexuality is likely to be a subject of intense debate. Because chemical tests of its ink have not yet been run, the papyrus is also apt to be challenged on the basis of authenticity; King herself emphasizes that her theories about the text’s significance are based on the assumption that the fragment is genuine, a question that has by no means been definitively settled. That her article’s publication will be seen at least in part as a provocation is clear from the title King has given the text: ‘The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife.’

“The Inside Story of a Controversial New Text About Jesus.” — Ariel Sabar, Smithsonian magazine

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How timing and creativity can reignite interest in a toy:

Not long ago, three inventors—toiling at home, unaware of one another’s existence—set out to reimagine the pogo. What was so sacred about that ungainly steel coil? they wondered. Why couldn’t you make a pogo stick brawny enough for a 250-pound adult? And why not vault riders a few feet, instead of measly inches? If athletes were pulling ‘big air’ on skateboards, snowboards and BMX bikes, why couldn’t the pogo stick be just as, well, gnarly?

When I reached one of the inventors, Bruce Middleton—who studied physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and describes himself as an ‘outcast scientist’—he told me that the problem had been a ‘conceptual basin.’”

‘Normal people, someone tells them a pogo stick is a thing with steel springs, they go, “That’s right,”’ Middleton said. ‘If that’s your basin, you’ll never come up with a very good pogo. An inventor is someone who recognizes the existence of a conceptual basin and sees that there’s a world outside the basin.’

“How the Pogo Stick Leapt From Classic Toy to Extreme Sport.” — Ariel Sabar, Smithsonian

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Inside 19th Century London’s sewers with “toshers,” who made a living by scouring for trash and waste to be resold:

They were mostly celebrated, nonetheless, for the living that the sewers gave them, which was enough to support a tribe of around 200 men–each of them known only by his nickname: Lanky Bill, Long Tom, One-eyed George, Short-armed Jack. The toshers earned a decent living; according to Mayhew’s informants, an average of six shillings a day–an amount equivalent to about $50 today. It was sufficient to rank them among the aristocracy of the working class–and, as the astonished writer noted, ‘at this rate, the property recovered from the sewers of London would have amounted to no less than £20,000 [today $3.3 million] per annum.’

Quite Likely the Worst Job Ever.” — Mike Dash, Smithsonian

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Top 5 Longreads of the Week: The New York Times Magazine, GQ, Stanford Magazine, The New Yorker, Smithsonian Magazine, fiction from The Atlantic, plus a guest pick from Damien Joyce.

Tracing the modern Olympics back to their origin in rural England, where there was a very different set of competitive events:

Ah, but in Much Wenlock, the Olympic spirit thrived, year after year—as it does to this day. Penny Brookes had first scheduled the games on October 22, 1850, in an effort ‘to promote the moral, physical and intellectual improvement of the inhabitants’ of Wenlock. However, notwithstanding this high-minded purpose, and unlike the sanctimonious claptrap that suffocates the Games today, Penny Brookes also knew how to put a smile on the Olympic face. His annual Much Wenlock games had the breezy ambience of a medieval county fair. The parade to the ‘Olympian Fields’ began, appropriately, at the two taverns in town, accompanied by heralds and bands, with children singing, gaily tossing flower petals. The winners were crowned with laurel wreaths, laid on by the begowned fairest of Much Wenlock’s fair maids. Besides the classic Greek fare, the competitions themselves tended to the eclectic. One year there was a blindfolded wheelbarrow race, another offered ‘an old woman’s race for a pound of tea’ and on yet another occasion there was a pig chase, with the intrepid swine squealing past the town’s limestone cottages until cornered ‘in the cellar of Mr. Blakeway’s house.’

“The Little-Known History of How the Modern Olympics Got Their Start.” — Frank Deford, Smithsonian

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On June 10, 1912, a family was brutally murdered in a small Iowa town. The murders remain unsolved:

The Moores were not discovered until several hours later, when a neighbor, worried by the absence of any sign of life in the normally boisterous household, telephoned Joe’s brother, Ross, and asked him to investigate. Ross found a key on his chain that opened the front door, but barely entered the house before he came rushing out again, calling for Villisca’s marshal, Hank Horton. That set in train a sequence of events that destroyed what little hope there may have been of gathering useful evidence from the crime scene. Horton brought along Drs. J. Clark Cooper and Edgar Hough and Wesley Ewing, the minister of the Moore’s Presbyterian congregation. They were followed by the county coroner, L.A. Linquist, a third doctor, F.S. Williams (who became the first to examine the bodies and estimate a time of death). When a shaken Dr Williams emerged, he cautioned members of the growing crowd outside: ‘Don’t go in there, boys; you’ll regret it until the last day of your life.’ Many ignored the advice; as many as 100 curious neighbors and townspeople tramped as they pleased through the house, scattering fingerprints, and in one case even removing fragments of Joe Moore’s skull as a macabre keepsake.

“The Ax Murderer Who Got Away.” — Mike Dash, Smithsonian

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A history of how chickens went from the jungle to dinner tables all around the world:

Europeans arriving in North America found a continent teeming with native turkeys and ducks for the plucking and eating. Some archaeologists believe that chickens were first introduced to the New World by Polynesians who reached the Pacific coast of South America a century or so before the voyages of Columbus. Well into the 20th century, chickens, although valued, particularly as a source of eggs, played a relatively minor role in the American diet and economy. Long after cattle and hogs had entered the industrial age of centralized, mechanized slaughterhouses, chicken production was still mostly a casual, local enterprise. The breakthrough that made today’s quarter-million-bird farms possible was the fortification of feed with antibiotics and vitamins, which allowed chickens to be raised indoors. Like most animals, chickens need sunlight to synthesize vitamin D on their own, and so up through the first decades of the 20th century, they typically spent their days wandering around the barnyard, pecking for food. Now they could be sheltered from weather and predators and fed a controlled diet in an environment designed to present the minimum of distractions from the essential business of eating. Factory farming represents the chicken’s final step in its transformation into a protein-producing commodity. Hens are packed so tightly into wire cages (less than half a square foot per bird) that they can’t spread their wings; as many as 20,000 to 30,000 broilers are crowded together in windowless buildings.

Jerry Adler and Andrew Lawler, Smithsonian

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A call for justice for women in the Middle East. The writer, who was sexually assaulted by Egyptian police last year, says the revolutions have not addressed the plight of women:

Yes: They hate us. It must be said. 

Some may ask why I’m bringing this up now, at a time when the region has risen up, fueled not by the usual hatred of America and Israel but by a common demand for freedom. After all, shouldn’t everyone get basic rights first, before women demand special treatment? And what does gender, or for that matter, sex, have to do with the Arab Spring? But I’m not talking about sex hidden away in dark corners and closed bedrooms. An entire political and economic system — one that treats half of humanity like animals — must be destroyed along with the other more obvious tyrannies choking off the region from its future. Until the rage shifts from the oppressors in our presidential palaces to the oppressors on our streets and in our homes, our revolution has not even begun.

“Why Do They Hate Us?” — Mona Eltahawy, Foreign Policy

See also: “Women: The Libyan Rebellion’s Secret Weapon.” — Joshua Hammer, Smithsonian