BBC’s The Beauty of Maps

What cartographic creativity has to do with the limitations of copyright law.

More than a year ago, I featured BBC’s excellent program, The Beauty of Maps: Seeing Art in Cartography, at the time only viewable on BBC’s highly restrictive iPlayer. The series has since been pulled from iPlayer and is unavailable on DVD — a shame of media obsolescence, since it was a remarkable celebration of creativity in cartography. But its presence on YouTube, more than a clandestine treat for map-lovers, makes a powerful case in the copyright debate on having “illegal” content online, even if it’s unavailable elsewhere. It breaks my heart to think about the invaluable knowledge and insight rotting away in siloed archives and, in my book, any law that enables this is a broken law and one that begs breaking. Enjoy.

Our love affair with maps is as old as civilization itself. Each map tells its own story and hides its own secret. Maps delight, they unsettle, they reveal deep truths, not just about where we come from, but about who we are.”

Hereford’s mappa mundi is many things — an encyclopedia of all the world’s knowledge, a memento mori, a remarkable piece of medieval art. It remains a unique testament of a vanished world and a vivid illustration of the depth, complexity and artistic genius of maps themselves.”

For more on the genius and charisma of cartography, don’t miss these 7 must-read books on maps.

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.

BBC’s The Romantics: The Birth of the Individual in Modern Society

What The French Revolution has to do with the love of nature and the birth of the modern individual.

The great philosopher and writer Jean-Jaques Rousseau was born 299 years ago today. His work sparked a new dawn of hope for liberty and equality, ultimately fueling one of the greatest sociopolitical upheavals in the history of our civilization — The French Revolution — and, eventually, the American Revolution. These “Romantic” ideas permeated nearly every facet of culture, from art to politics, and the legacy of his seminal novel, Émile: or, On Education underpins many of the concepts in these 7 must-read books on education.

To celebrate Rousseau’s birthday, here is a fantastic 2005 BBC documentary titled The Romantics, exploring the birth of the individual in modern society. Each of the program’s three parts examines one key aspect of the Romanticism movement. Liberty looks at how Rousseau and his contemporaries, including Denis Diderot, William Blake, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, challenged the authority of Church and King to rein in a new era of self-empowerment.

Eternity explores the search for meaning in a world without God, following the revolutions of the 18th century, which forced people to make sense of their new reality outside the sanctions of the Church.

Nature examines how The Industrial Revolution tried to subvert and dominate nature on the path to profit, and how Romantic artists attempted to counter this tension by recasting nature in a context of relevance, approachability and understanding.

For more on Rousseau, the fascinating and honest The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau won’t disappoint.

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.

The Beekepers: Artful Documentary about Colony Collapse Disorder

What Aristotle’s hobby has to do with the future of agriculture and our best defense against disaster.

I love bees. My grandmother, who essentially raised me, is a beekeeper and instilled in me a deep respect for these gentle and amazing creatures, so it breaks my heart every time I hear of new evidence for colony collapse disorder and the vanishing of the honeybee.

The Beekepers is a fascinating experimental documentary by filmmaker Richard Robinson, exploring the cultural history of beekeeping, from Aristotle to medieval monasteries to Darwin to the U.S. Army, and looking for answers to the CCD crisis through a near-expressionist blend of black-and-white archival footage and voice over narration. Equal parts artful and thoughtful, the film is a genre-bender with an uncommon creative angle, offering an illuminating glimpse of the intricate mechanisms driving a complex and all-permeating ecosystem.

Now that the environment is changing, the beekeeper has taken on another role: that of the environmental monitor. It turns out that bees are better at telling us what’s going on in the environment than just about anything else. They’re better than NASA’s satellites at tracking global warming and they’re the most efficient way we know of testing toxic waste sites. The government has even studied them as a way to alert us to environmental disasters. So when colony collapse disorder started killing bees mysteriously, it wasn’t just the food supply that concerned scinetists — it was the environment itself.”

For more on colony collapse disorder and what it means for the future of our civilization, I highly recommend Rowan Jacobsen’s Fruitless Fall: The Collapse of the Honey Bee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis.

via @Jake_Barton; image via Wikimedia Commons

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.