Please see selected recent isolation-related change below.
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January 2020
Please see below selected recent language-related change.
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7,099: Distinct spoken languages in the world, as of 2017
63%: Share of the world’s population that natively speaks one of 12 languages: Arabic, Bengali, all dialects of Chinese, English, French, German, Hindu-Urdu, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish
December 2019
Please see below selected recent culture-related change.
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December 2019
In the 1840s Henry David Thoreau swapped his busy schedule in Concord, Massachusetts, for a wooden hut he built himself near Walden Pond. We had the privilege to visit Walden in July 2012; it exceeded expectations in its tranquility and beauty - and the swim in the pond itself was unforgettable.
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We can be at our most reflective, and perhaps society could be at its most reflexive, around St John's Eve and the other, similar seven calendar points...
Goin' ridin' down by Avalon
Would you meet me in the country
In the summertime in England
Would you meet me?
In the Church of St. John . . .
Down by Avalon . . . .
- from Summertime in England, by Van Morrison
T.S. Eliot died over 50 years ago now. His legacy remains profound and his poetry moves me deeply.
In 2016 I had the privilege of visiting his final resting place, East Coker.
I read or listen to the peerless Little Gidding at least once a quarter, sometimes more often, and almost every line entrances, as if peering through a veil at something once known, but half-forgotten because not looked-for.
According to Open Culture, Orwell's Animal Farm was almost never published. The manuscript barely survived the Nazi bombing of London during World War II, and then initially T.S. Eliot (an important editor at Faber & Faber) and other publishers rejected the book. It eventually came to see the light of day but, reportedly, Animal Farm still can’t be legally read in China, Burma and North Korea, or across large parts of the Islamic world.
However, the Internet Archive offers free access to audio versions of Animal Farm and Orwell’s other major classic, 1984.
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God @TheTweetOfGod 8h8 hours ago
90% of My time is spent adversely affecting the fortunes of your favourite team.
I have listened to and would recommend the following podcasts (2015-2018 recommendations to follow):
2014
Where did everything come from? Where are we heading? Big History tells the story of the Universe starting from the Big Bang, the formation of stars, planets, life on Earth, modern civilisation — and what might exist in the future.
Asking which shifts, in which centuries, really shaped the modern world. a historian identified 10 leading drivers of change, century by century
Meanwhile, Prospect believes that reflecting on the past can give great in sight into the present and has published accordingly The past in perspective e-book.
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