internet explorers club | more volcano webcams please! 🌋
Popocatépetl is erupting! I have a soft spot for this volcano (among others) because it’s one place my great-grandma found in a book and loved the name so much that she vowed to visit it. (She did! Along with Chichicastenango, Guatemala and the Skagerrak & Kattegat strait in Scandinavia). With this eruption, Mexico has multiple webcams on Popocatépetl, which means that there are some incredible images coming out:
Further south in Colombia, there’s a volcanic caldera that does double-duty as a “naturally heated” mud bath. Sign me up!
Long Reads: I got completely sucked into these two long pieces about wine fraud. Who knew wine fraud was a thing?! Dear reader: it is apparently an incredibly lucrative business. One piece on the largest known wine fraud, and another specifically on bottles purported to have been owned by Thomas Jefferson (spoiler alert: they’re fake). Part of the issue is that no one knows what a specific centuries-old vintage should taste like—so it’s easy to fake.
God bless this historian, btw:
“A researcher named Cinder Goodwin, who had spent fifteen years studying Jefferson’s voluminous papers, responded to Broadbent that November, expressing skepticism. “Jefferson’s daily account book, virtually all of his letters, his banker’s statements, and miscellaneous internal French customs forms survive for this period and mention no 1787 vintages,” she wrote. When a reporter from the Times reached Goodwin, before the auction, to ask about the connection, she noted that whereas the initials on Rodenstock’s bottles were written “Th.J.,” in his correspondence Jefferson tended to use a colon—“Th:J.”
What’s old is new again! Permafrost levels in Siberia are decreasing, which is leading to mammoth tusk excavation on a huge scale—with the rarity of elephant ivory, wooly mammoths are standing in. These photographs of the guys who find the tusks are incredible.
A new project to digitize and analyze all the graffiti at Pompeii, which is amazing, and a look at the disappearing art of painting signs on buildings, which I am also such a sucker for.
A new art installation in Berlin—a butcher shop composed entirely of textiles. You can purchase the meat! They will even wrap it up in brown paper for you. Perhaps we should all move towards textile exhibits because a curator had to make a decision to “kill” an exhibit of a stem cell jacket (no, really) because it was “growing too fast and trying to burst out of its container” (!)
Today in Hamilton: In the process of digitizing early American manuscript collections, the NYPL found a young woman’s diary that chronicles Hamilton’s duel & eventual death. Fascinating look at the dressers of Broadway shows (Hamilton is one show highlighted). A look at the producer of Hamilton, particularly how his job shifts now that it’s such a huge success. A rather eye-opening piece on Aaron Burr’s use of ciphers and codes in his letters, and weirdly, how it got brought up in the Apple rejoinder against the FBI.
Etcetera: A List of Modern Relationships.
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emilyhummel.com | @hummeline
