To Understand the Past, Pick Up an Old Magazine
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
https://archive.org/details/sim_microfilm
Literally vaults and shipping containers of microfilm reels: https://archive.org/details/all-serials-in-microfilm-sim-mic...
It’s amazing how evergreen that general sentiment seems to be.
> It is the month of December, and yet the city is at this very moment in a sweat. Licence is given to the general merrymaking. Everything resounds with mighty preparations, – as if the Saturnalia differed at all from the usual business day! So true it is that the difference is nil, that I regard as correct the remark of the man who said: "Once December was a month; now it is a year."
(https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius/Let...)
The problem with the statement isn't that the people saying it are always wrong; the problem is that it is always being said to some extent and therefore carries no particular information content in its mere statement. Rates of statement might be relevant but we have nowhere near the data we'd need historically to determine that.
Whoever said that?
The transition to longer daylight during winter solstice in the less-connected, less-commercialized times made for more grounded local, personal engagements. Writing that letter, making that treat, giving that gift, sharing that moment during the colder, darker times. Many of these individual productions are no longer created. Lost and replaced by layers of conveniences and alternative social interactions developed with each generation. Piled on through centuries of commerce. No wonder its evergreen.
For that time of year, as an aging introvert, the darkest days remind me to keep working on my one-on-one engagements.
[Edit] 40 years rather than 35. Doesn't time fly!
> "Seeking the Magic Mushroom" is a 1957 photo essay by amateur mycologist Robert Gordon Wasson describing his experience taking psilocybin mushrooms in 1955 during a Mazatec ritual in Oaxaca, Mexico.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeking_the_Magic_Mushroom
I found this issue of Life in the Internet Archive, here's the Magic Mushroom photo essay: https://archive.org/details/sim_life_1957-05-13_42_19/page/1....
The KKK baseball team story is a report, not an advertisement (although there's an insane amount of ads in that magazine): https://archive.org/details/sim_life_1957-05-13_42_19/page/4....
Plus, about half those old books had information a modern person generally hopes to never use, even if they do still make things. Much as I love living history, I don't want to mill lumber by hand or do anything that involves the phrase "Measure out the white lead and mix it into the...".
There's lots of stuff that would be interesting and potentially useful, but information these days seems to spread based on immediate usefulness (Except math. Everyone just accepts people all should learn a pretty large amount even though only some of them will ever use it), and people don't really think about uncommon scenarios.
But now it seems like we're right on the edge where even modern practical things are being forgotten, and "I don't know how to cook" is starting to literally mean "I doordash every day and couldn't make a pot of spaghetti to save my life, and I think an impact driver must be a porn star name".
Percents, fractions, what the word "average" means...
Most people almost never do these things themselves, unless they like the process of planning things on paper without tech, or they do these things so often you'd be seriously slowed down without being able to them mentally.
Everyone should learn math, because it lets you do the things that need it, and because for a lot of people, the mathematical beauty seems to be the motivating factor to do those things in the first place, and those things tend to pay well and might save the planet.
The problem is when people act like we will be balancing checkbooks, picking stocks by hand, and adding fractions on paper every day.
People hear that and think it's useless because they are confident they won't be doing those things, because... I've never seen anyone use calculus in my entire life. I'm not sure I've seen algebra either.
I've heard about geometry, but mostly extremely basic things, or for things that would be easy to do in CAD.
Honestly I'd probably make a FreeCAD sketch instead of doing the math by hand if I was going to find the height of a tree with the Pythagorean theorem, being able to actually see it all would be an extra confirmation I did it right and the measurements were at least approximately good, and I'd have something to screenshot to prove the method works, to people who know even less math than me.
Fractions mostly show up when dealing with material that is sized in fractions, and half the time they're not really fractions, just nominal names for things, And you'll need to look up or measure the real size anyway.
It's not like people are hitting brick walls and thinking "Oh well, can't do this project, the math is too hard, shoulda stayed in school", it's more like people say "This doesn't pay well, maybe if learned math I'd have a totally different job and be doing totally different stuff I can't even imagine".
It's not like a hammer that you know exactly when you need it even if you don't have it.
Plus, scientists get things wrong sometimes, and there's tons of flaws in papers, so even just for pure understanding the world you need a lot more than math to actually be able to read a scientific paper or a political survey, and without all the other stuff the math looks less useful than it is.
I use percentages constantly to analyze choices every single day, in my personal life... Not doing so implies lack of due care and consideration.... I have to ere on the side of people not being lazy, willfully ignorant and unthinking, right? Ere go most people must use percentages constantly as I do.
Angles? Telling someone what angle something is, is something I do regularly... It's a right angle, or 15 degrees or whatever...
I could go on but really...
They tend to be dress shoes or workboots nearly exclusively, and as styles have changed, there's little growth in the industry.
The last shoe repair shop I used was very nice, had merchandise for me to purchase; I picked up a few aromatic cedar shoe trees, some polish and brushes, and had a couple pairs of shoes repaired very nicely. The owner was the only worker there and utterly overwhelmed; he gestured at his backlog which was immense. He cranked the 80s hair metal while he worked. There was supposed to be a shoe shine service, but no shoe shine boy to do it. He was kind to the homeless and passers-by, and people could sit and hang out in his store if they wanted.
He was murdered by a homeless fellow while trying to be kind to him. The homeless guy had gone to use the bathroom, and found the owner's gun lying on the counter, and for some reason used it against the owner himself. I will really miss that owner and his store.
I live in a town of <15k people, and there are three cobblers. All three are marketed a bit differently: one is "<Name> Shoe Repair", on is "<Town> Saddlery and Footwear", and one is "<Name> Leathergoods". The saddlery has found a niche in working with the owners of working horses, but all three offer the same services at the end of the day.
When I lived in a medium-sized city in Virginia, there were none that I could find online - or even in the phone book, which I tried considering the clientele that they seem to serve. I was finally able to find a competent leatherworker by asking around in the local Hispanic community that was largely made up of Salvadorians who worked in the trades. They didn't have a storefront or really even a business name; you just had to know who they were, drop by their home, and pay cash.
Here is a video that I stumbled across recently:
The amount of presentism in 2023 is ridiculous and completely uncritically accepted by most everyone.
For all the moaning about how we've lost a monoculture because we don't all watch the same TV channels, I think those people are too young to remember things like LIFE magazine, the big, unavoidable, pictorial shared American experience, never really breaking news but always showing us the zeitgeist in broad strokes.
Today's magazines have niche or tabloid appeal at best.
https://static01.nyt.com/images/2013/06/15/nytfrontpage/scan... [1]
Should be helpful—the date syntax is straightforward.
NYT does this daily. The first one I can find is:
https://static01.nyt.com/images/2012/07/06/nytfrontpage/scan... [2]
[0] NYT front page scan from 15 June 2023
[1] from 15 June 2013
[2] from 06 July 2012, seemingly the first
Can't remember who said it though.
It has a monthly subscription, and searching is, well, tedious. Like, you want to go to the Business section, and binary search of the pages plus guessing is the only way.
- Popular Mechanics and the first mention of a CNC which I read of --- the U.S. Navy putting one on an aircraft carrier at the cost of half-a-million dollars
- the computer magazine which had a review of the GRiD Compass (I later bought a GRiDCase III spending way more than I should have)
- the issue of Newsweek which had the 16 page insert ad for the original Apple Macintosh
- the issue of Time which had an article on gun control where the photo of weapons from a gun buyback prominently featured an inexpensive air pistol
- the news magazine which had a tiny sidebar article covering an international incident which I actually had direct knowledge of
https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine
I only half jokingly say everything I know about computers I learned from reading Byte around 1985-1990.
I love the old ads lol. Except I also read these mags back in the 80s.
Comment was evidently trying to point out incorrect use of apostrophe.
I found a listing an ancestor of mine had for his booming asbestos business in San Francisco.
You can learn a lot about the times through the businesses and products that were thriving (elevators!).
Just because past generations didn’t have a label for “toxic masculinity” doesn’t mean it didn’t exist, or that we can’t learn from its historical effects.
Same goes for plenty of modern social and relational concepts that were either ignored, or not-understood in the past.
The value of books and magazines prior to about 1995, and art in general, is they are physical artifacts of peoples diverse lived experiences that provide waypoints, continuity, and a fabric for a society and civilization. They enable a stability and freedom from the power struggles of the present, and they are there for more than to be just gawked at and complained about, imo.
It's also much more accepting and empathetic to those who were bullied for being different.
Seriously. I understand that this is a politically charged issue in all kinds of ways, but as a white man who is the sole income earner of a traditional family, I expect to find all kinds of support for various identity groups pretty much everywhere I interact with others - but I've yet to find a single one that I identify with.
While I don't share that view, it's easy to see how people who are explicitly excluded in that way can come to feel that "diversity" initiatives are a thinly-veiled attack on everything they believe in.
Personally I see it as a correction of a long-term problem, and like most reactions, the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. In a generation I think it will settle down into something much more reasonable and equitable.
But they did. The "macho" trait was considered a negative feature of Latino culture by mainstream Americans as early as the 1890s.
They didn't think the label applied to themselves, of course. Introspection is harder than labelling outsiders.
If you read Spanish magazines from the 20's and early 30's from Spain you would find a society pretty close to the American one, at least in urban places.
The English Gentleman term can be mapped to the "Caballero" term almost by a ratio 1:1, except that "Caballero" can also mean "Sir" as in "excuse me, sir".
The Anglosaxon society might have been more individualistic and the Hispanic one more group oriented, but once you chatted with individuals the traits faded out a lot.
Since the French burgueois revolution from 1789 and the Industrial Revolution, the Western society has been nearly uniformized at urban places from Andalusia to Sweden. OFC in rural places the gap was bigger, but Feudalism lost and from that the influence from both Churchs.
But what you're describing does seem to still be true for at least a lot of the fly-over states.
That's kind of a large part of what all the drama has been in the last one-two decades. Part of the country has left that (and more) all largely behind, while the rest are clutching desperately to that past as if it's the very thing that "made america great".