The Current Collected Works :)

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Meet the Spangled Cotinga (Cotinga cayana)! While females of the species come in shades of brown, males have bright turquoise plumage, purple-colored throats, and black patterning along their bodies. This South American bird forages on fruits and berries throughout the forest and is an important seed disperser in its habitat. Since it prefers to hang out on the tops of the tallest trees, it’s hard to spot from the ground.

Photo: Jéssica Martins, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, iNaturalist

add me to your discord server so I can do the online equivalent of arriving at a party saying hi to the people I know then standing awkwardly in the corner for the rest of the night

From the article:

“If you look only at the trend of species declines, it would be easy to think that we’re failing to protect biodiversity, but you would not be looking at the full picture,” said Penny Langhammer, lead author of the study and Executive Vice President of Re:wild. “What we show with this paper is that conservation is, in fact, working to halt and reverse biodiversity loss. It is clear that conservation must be prioritized and receive significant additional resources and political support globally, while we simultaneously address the systemic drivers of biodiversity loss, such as unsustainable consumption and production.”

This massive meta analysis (for those not familiar, a study analyzing the results of many studies on similar topics) found that the vast majority of conservation efforts show much much better results than doing nothing. In many cases, biodiversity loss was not only stopped but reversed.

This shows that conservation efforts really work and money invested is put to very good use. Legally protecting endangered species really works, restoring habitat really works, removing invasive species really works, returning land to Indigenous communities works. All of the blood, sweat, and tears being poured into protecting the natural world has been making a real, big, tangible, difference on a global scale.

Why yes, I can solve your town's problem. I presume there is a villain to defeat? Some beast to lay low with my fearsome prowess? My lance is fain to taste battle once-

Oh. A trade dispute, you say. Third party mediator needed. I see.

Tom Thomson aka Thomas John Thomson (Canadian, 1877-1917, b. Claremont, Pickering, Canada, d. Canoe Lake, Canada) - Northern River, c. 1943, Silkscreen on Board

putting ribbon in my hair not in a coquette way but in a late 1700s frenzied lawyer type of way

Fulfilling my dream to be a Nelson era navy lieutenant

"hephaistion made this" in a beautiful trompe-l'oeil piece of paper half unstuck by the wind still some of the rawest stuff ever put in a mosaic (2nd century bc, pergamon)

lino cut series, inspired by photos of the Trans - Antarctic expedition, lead by Sir Ernest Shackleton, photographed by Frank Hurley

prints available on instagram!

I do think how you react to 6 7 is a good litmus test over whether you'll be a cranky old person who will continue the stupid cycle of "kids these days". but also we do need to be educating the youth about history and how the two numbers have been in a fear based relationship because 7 8 9

6 7 is how we mend fences and show 6 that 7 has grown and changed as a number

The origin point for nearly all of those “you work harder than a medieval peasant” memes and articles is Juliet Schor’s The Overworked American (1993). The argument has been debunked quite a few times, so I won’t belabor the point here. Schor bases her estimates of medieval working hours on a 1935 article by Nora Kenyon, and an unpublished article by Gregory Clark, and in both cases ignores the authors’ careful efforts to distinguish between total days worked and instead just cherry-picks the lowest number, even as the authors caution that those numbers likely don’t represent someone’s total employment.

Kenyon notes a set of day-laborers working 120 days per year which makes it into Schor’s work, but Kenyon’s final suggestion that the normal annual working year was 308 days does not, for instance. I can’t get at an unpublished article, but Clark has continued to write on the topic and in his 2018 “Growth or stagnation?” presents a detailed argument for a 250-300-day work-year with no sense that this is a revision of his previous positions, leading me to suspect similar cherry-picking as with Kenyon.

In short, Schor’s works is quite shoddy and we shan’t rely on it.

Now part of the complication there is that for the European Middle Ages, across so much area, what we see is a lot of confusing evidence – statutory minimums, required labor on a lord’s land and so on – which may or may not represent a full working year. What we don’t typically get is someone just telling us how many work days were in the agricultural calendar.

But as you may recall, we’re anchoring this discussion in the Roman world and in a rare instance where the ancient evidence is better, Roman agricultural writers just straight up tell us how many working days there were in a year on the Roman agricultural calendar: 290 (Columella 2.12.8-9). He allows 45 days for holidays as well as inclement weather and another 30 days for rest immediately after the crop is sown, to recover from the difficult labor of the final plowing.

The medieval work calendar is not meaningfully different. As noted above, Both Clark and Kenyon end up with similar working-day estimates from the medieval evidence as Columella’s figure. The medieval number is probably slightly lower: the medieval religious calendar might have around 45 feast days but workers might also be expected to spend Sundays in religious observance, which might pull the work-year down to around 270 total working days, plus or minus.

By all evidence, those working days were both less rigid but also longer than modern working hours. On the one hand, peasant farmers are essentially self-employed entrepreneurs, making their own hours. They can arrive in the field a bit late, sometimes leave a bit early. It was certainly common in warmer climates for workers to take a midday break (a siesta) to avoid exhausting themselves in the hottest part of the day. I will say, anyone who has done functionally any outside work in a warm climate will recognize that a midday break can allow you to work more than just pushing straight through the heat of the day because you tire more slowly.

So on the one hand the work hours are somewhat flexible. On the other hand as functionally anyone who has ever worked on a farm or spoken with someone who has will tell you, the working day in absolute terms is long, essentially starting at sunrise and running to sunset. And this is certainly the implication we get from our sources. Because of atmospheric refraction, there are actually slightly more than 12 sunlight hours per day on average (it’s around ~12.3 or so, depending on latitude), though this of course varies seasonally. The bad news for our farmers, of course, is that the shortest days are in the winter when the labor demands are lower.

While festival calendars feature events throughout the year, it is not an accident that major festivals in a lot of pre-modern agrarian cultures are concentrated in late Fall, winter and early Spring. For the Christian calendar, that includes things like All Saints Day (Nov 1), Martinmas (Nov 11), the regular slew of December holidays as as the holidays of the Eastertide in early spring. For the Romans, you have major festivals like the Parentalia and Lupercalia in February, the Liberalia in March, the Cerialia in April and the Saturnalia in December.

So in practice the average maximum working day might actually be a bit longer than 12 hours, but we should account for breaks and general schedule flexibility. We might assume, for comparison, something like a ten hour work day. By that measure, our peasants probably put in somewhere between 2,500 and 3,000 working hours per year. By contrast, your average ‘overworked American’ has 260 working days a year, at eight hours a day for just 2,080 hours.

So to answer the question: no, you do not work more than a medieval (or ancient) peasant (despite your labor buying a much higher standard of living).

Bret Devereaux, "Life, Work, Death and the Peasant, Part IVb: Working Days"

Masked Palm Civet or Himalayan Palm Civet (Paguma larvata), family Viverridae, Thailand

photograph by Alexander Coke Smith

quotes and excerpts float around on tumblr that are like "stories make us human! the most important thing is stories. stories can change the world!" and it's very compelling until you remember that writers, who are broadly (but not universally) revved up about stories, are broadly (but not universally) good at writing

i went to a talk tonight that was being given by a food person, and they were like "food and cooking make us human! the most important thing in the world is feeding people. home cooking can change the world!"

(nearly verbatim but rearranged)

so i'm glad it's not an affliction unique to writers

"Good girl" is nice and all, but someone just told me "you serve me well" and I felt neurons fire I didn't even know I had