Over at the Literary Review, Adrian Tinniswood reviews James Fox’s The World According to Colour: A Cultural History, in which Fox argues that color is “a pigment of our imaginations”:
The Tiv people of West Africa get by perfectly happily with just three basic colour terms: black, white and red. Mursi cattle farmers in Ethiopia have eleven colour terms for cows, but they have none for anything else. At the other end of the spectrum, the Optical Society of America lists 2,755 primary colours, while paint manufacturers now offer more than 40,000 dyes and pigments, so many…that they have run out of sensible names for them. ‘Dead Salmon’ and ‘Churlish Green’ are two of the more outlandish….
Speaking of outlandish colors, check out these beautiful creatures:
Today I learned that, in the 4th century BC, an elite military unit comprising 150 pair-bonded male couples—the Sacred Band of Thebes—went undefeated for three decades.
Long-time readers know of my love for the Grateful Dead; most of them would probably rather stick nickels in their noses than listen. I’m okay with that. But here are a couple of Dead-adjacent albums worth checking out anyway: Mickey Hart’s RAMU, and Ned Lagin’s Seastones.
“The drug war’s simplistic account of what drugs do and are,” writes Michael Pollan, “has for too long prevented us from thinking clearly about the meaning and potential use of these very different substances.”
