Start with injera, the tangy Ethiopian sourdough flatbread, and dig into these great eateries in metro Denver.

London-based photographer Maisie Cousins is known for her work exploring the relationship between the beautiful and the grotesque. Her sticky, sweaty, hyper-saturated photographs and videos eschew the conventional ideals of beauty and sex in a way that can’t help but force a reaction out of you. 

For this social commission for NOWNESS (shown here in a special edit), Cousins draws on the #satisfaction internet phenomenon, getting up close and personal with flowers and insects to explore the visceral and playful sexual interactions that are all around us in nature—expect slow-motion, macro-close-ups of fluffy bumblebees rubbing their bodies inside flowers, and dripping nectar and butterflies rubbing their wings.

This is a follow-on answer to a previous mailbag post, specifically the part in which the questioner asks, Would you have any thoughts on how to… improve the adaptive skills needed for bringing IF to newer formats and into audio? … Continue reading →

Whereas many photographers seek to capture beautiful ephemeral moments with their camera lens, French photographer Thomas Jorion is drawn to a more eternal timeline. Using an analog 4×5 camera, Jorion focuses on abandoned places: spaces and structures lost to the nature and time. In his photographs, once majestic buildings that are now largely forgotten are given the same careful composition and attention that more currently-engaged spaces might receive. His solo exhibition Veduta at Esther Woerdehoff Galerie in Paris explores the abandoned villas and palaces of Italy through April 6, 2019. More

Basse Stittgen uses blood discarded from slaughterhouses as a biomaterial that he dries, heat-presses and then turns into egg holders, records and other domestic objects

I’ve been cooking this idea for a long time; well, not that long honestly. It all started in 2017 when I studied a brief yet dense course on Curation by An Paenhuysen. Here I learned, among other amazing curation ideas, about the existence of a term, the White Cube. There has been some seriously deep […]

The post The Spirit of the White Cube: Nurturing Photographic Consumption appeared first on Light Stalking.

The Denver Psilocybin Initiative made it onto the May 2019 ballot.

Medieval fragments of Arthurian legend have been sitting in the Bristol Central Library for hundreds of years and no one noticed—until now. The newly discovered text—hidden in a later book—tells of a battle in which Merlin leads a charge using a dragon banner that actually breathes fire.

The 13th-century manuscript pages were tucked away in the binding of a later, printed book, a four-volume set of the works of Jean Gerson, a French scholar and theologian. The Gerson text was printed in Strasbourg, on the French-German border, sometime between 1494 and 1502, before making its way to England. ”The [Gerson] text would have come to England unbound, without covers—it’s lighter and easier to travel that way,” explains Leah Tether, a librarian and president of the British branch of the International Arthurian Society. “In England, whoever ordered them would then have taken them to a local bookbinder, and he would have added the covers.” That’s where the much earlier Arthurian pages came into play.

Paper-making and bookbinding weren’t yet codified crafts in 16th-century England, and piecing together fragments of old manuscripts to hide unsightly binding features of new books was a trick of the bookbinding trade. Vellum pages like those of the Arthurian fragments were written on painstakingly prepared calfskin. Too precious to be thrown out, vellum, regardless of what was already on it, would have been kept in a workshop to be used again in a pinch. In this case, they had been repurposed as pastedowns, or the endpapers covering the boards of the Gerson book’s inside cover.

Then, sometime in the 19th century, a Bristol book conservator carefully lifted these pages off the hard inside cover of the book and rebound them as flyleaves, those extra blank pages at the beginnings and ends of books. “Sometimes things that don’t have value to one person might have some value to someone else,” says Tether. “Maybe they thought, ‘Let’s turn them into flyleaves so someone who wants to can read them one day.’”

That someone was librarian Michael Robinson, who found the 13th-century pages while searching for examples of the vellum recycling practice to use as teaching material for a medieval bookmaking history course at the University of Bristol. Lucky for Robinson, a catalogue published by a prescient Bristol city librarian in 1899 noted manuscripts in the collection with this feature. This was an unusual practice, as annotations about binding are not usually found in library catalogues, Tether says. Robinson photographed the recycled manuscript flyleaves at the library and was examining the images back at home. “Having seen signs of conflict in the narration, I think the phrase ‘chastel de Trèbes” first set me thinking. ‘Gauuein,’ ‘artu,’ and ‘merlin’ followed,” Robinson says via email. With these indications of a known battle from the legend and the characters Gawain, Arthur, and Merlin, Robinson contacted his colleague Tether to help determine the significance of his discovery.

Because the pages were once glued down, one side of each sheet is legible and the other side damaged. But the researchers have already found enough to generate excitement.

The Arthurian manuscript is written in Old French, the first language in which the tales were recorded. “We can tell immediately by the handwriting style that it’s from the 13th century,” says Tether. While library scientists are still working to pinpoint its age, they believe it dates from some time between 1250 and 1270. The earliest known Arthurian texts are from 1220, so this is a remarkably early version. Tales of King Arthur were passed along orally long before they were written down. It would still be at least a hundred years from this French text’s time before they were written down in English.

The librarians have determined that the newly discovered pages tell the story of the Battle of Trèbes, in which Merlin, King Arthur’s advisor, exhorts Arthur and his worn-out troops to persist in their fight against King Claudas, after which he leads the charge with the fire-breathing magical banner. There are some minor differences between how the battle is described in these pages and the version commonly accepted today. For instance, the story usually states that King Claudas suffered a thigh wound in this battle, considered a metaphor for castration or impotence. In the newly discovered version, the type of wound isn’t specified. These early details may change our understanding of the familiar tale, and tell us more about how the story changed as it went from oral renderings to French to English—and to modern versions.

Tether points out that it’s unusual to find a text of this kind recycled in this way. Usually these pieces were religious or liturgical texts, fragments of theological ideas that had gone out of vogue. Fictional tales were more highly prized, and less likely to be left for recycling. So why did this gold nugget end up as scrap?

Tether suggests it may be because it lacked illuminations and illustrations. Another theory is that this text was an exemplar—a sample from which scribes copied—and was simply retired after a while.

“I think what really delights me about this discovery,” Robinson says, “is that it may be an inspiration to our students.” It may be a rare discovery, but it is also a reminder that you never know what you’ll find when explore a library.

Matt Baker of Useful Charts creates helpful visual guides that condense hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of years of history into streamlined flowcharts. His poster Evolution of the Alphabet looks at nearly 3,800 years of the alphabet’s evolution, tracing it from Egyptian hieroglyphs (c. 1750 BCE) through Phoenician, early Greek and Latin, and finally to the present forms we use today. The limited edition print shows that some letters have appeared relatively the same for millennia, while others, like U, V, and W, developed much closer to our own time period from a single character. More

The natural world gets an unusual interpretation through the lens of Northern California-based painter Tiffany Bozic (previously). She combines a highly developed realism with surreal juxtapositions of animals and plants in carefully composed paintings that question the “natural order” of the environment. In Triangle of Love, an owl family cozies up in a bed of gold-hued four leaf clovers, while in Aether, moths and caterpillars are drawn to a marbled pentagon hovering within a dew-dappled geometric spiderweb. More

Last year, indie publisher Ahoy Comics hit the ground running with a launch that brought us refreshing and fun twists on everything from superheroes to classic horror comics. But now the publisher is ready for more—and io9 has an exclusive first look at the new titles its bringing to the table in 2019.

io9 can confirm that the next wave of Ahoy Comics books will begin in a few months time, with four new banner comic “magazines” launching across April, May, and June: Bronze Age Boogie, Planet of the Nerds, Hashtag: Danger, and the one-shot anthology Steel Cage. As with prior Ahoy titles, as well as the main comic stories, each issue will include an eclectic mix of backup material, from prose, to poetry, to even crossword puzzles, giving readers more bang for their buck with every issue. Here’s the lowdown on each of the new titles.

Kicking off the second wave on April 3, Stuart Moore and Alberto Ponticelli’s Bronze Age Boogie follows the adventures of a young warrior princess named Brita Constantina, who finds herself battling cosmic threats from Mars not just in 1975 BC, but across time into 1975 AD, too. Expect swords, sorcery, martians, and apparently the first bear in space, Major Ursa.

Following Boogie on April 17 will be Planet of the Nerds, by Paul Constant, Alan Robinson, and Randy Elliott. An homage to the classic teen nerd movies of the ‘80s, Planet’s twist is another timey-wimey one. Three jocks from the height of the eternal Nerd vs. Jock battlegrounds of ‘80s high schools find themselves cryogenically frozen, and woken up in 2019: where comic book movies dominate the box office, pop culture fandom rules the roost, and nerds are… well, at least kind of cool, much to their horror.

May 1 sees the launch of Tom Peyer and Chris Giarrusso’s Hashtag: Danger, a modern take on a Fantastic Four-esque team of scientific explorers (in this case a trio rather than a quartet) as they boldly explore supernatural mysteries, strange worlds, and ancient civilizations, and find out if the dangers lurking beneath all those things will kill them before they manage to kill one another.

Rounding out the wave on June 26 is an altogether different beast for Ahoy: Steel Cage, a 3-in-1 anthology standalone. Featuring three “pilot” tales from Mark Waid and Lanna Souvanny, Tom Peyer and Alan Robinson, and Stuart Moore and artist Peter Gross, Steel Cage will invite readers into three worlds—tales of intergalactic adventures, superheroic drama, and the dark story of the smartest man on earth—that they can then vote on to decide which will be crowned the victor of Steel Cage. The reward? Becoming a new ongoing comic series!

With its first wave of comics magazines, Ahoy Comics proved that there’s a place for weird, wonderful series on store shelves that are more than just a monthly story. Its second wave already seems to be living up to that promise too—and we can’t wait to see where it goes from here. The next wave of Ahoy Comics magazines officially begins this April.

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