The First Photograph: You may be interested in this fascinating deep dive on the world’s oldest surviving photograph, a pewter plate from 1827 that’s nearly invisible to the naked eye. The exposure lasted several days, and even the famous version you’ve seen in textbooks was hand retouched.
I’ve been catching up on a TV series based on an updated version of the famous, fictional French detective Maigret. Did you know that his creator Georges Simenon wrote roughly 200 novels under his own name, and well over a thousand more under sixteen different pseudonyms. Simenon is one of the most compulsive writers featured in this beautiful piece, Brennan Kenneth Brown writes about writers throughout history who just couldn’t stop writing. Chesterton averaged an essay a day for eleven years, Corin Tellado delivered a 76-page novel every week, and writers in China’s web fiction industry do 10,000 words a day. Really makes you think about what that kind of obsession looks like.
“And once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.” –Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore.
Regular visitors to TBTP already know how I feel about globes so I won’t go on and on about why I love this website. Folding Globes: This site lets you print, cut, and fold your own paper globes from real satellite and scientific data. Since you can’t flatten a sphere without distorting it, the globes are split into geometric shapes like icosahedrons and cubes that you fold together. There are free templates for everything from Earth at Night to Mars to Pangaea.
For more than a year, marshalled by animator Andy Bailey, more than 1000 artists collaborated to create a hand-drawn, shot-for-shot, animated, flipbook version of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. The entire three hours. 120,000 individually drawn pages. A couple of months ago, they released the first 11 minutes:
