ɯαɾɱ αɳԃ ɯҽιɾԃ
All images Lazy Mom
Welcome to week two of ɯαɾɱ αɳԃ ɯҽιɾԃ! You might have noticed that the last category each time is a colour, a Crayola colour name to be exact. Very open to suggestions or request for other categories though—get in touch!
(mostly) historical snackchat
A Social History of Jell-O Salad: The Rise and Fall of an American Icon
Betty Crocker’s Absurd, Gorgeous Atomic Age Creations – “There is a card for Fonduloha (pineapple, turkey, mayonnaise, curry, peanuts, coconut and canned mandarins, put back into a pineapple shell)”
Our messed-up relationship with food has a long history. It started with butter.
The historians cooking up mythical beasts – “Making a cokentryce calls for needle, thread, and a lot of meat”
What Indians ate in the 12th century
Painting the first taste of freedom – an artist paints former inmates’ first post-release meals
hairy
How Geckos Turn their Stickiness On and Off – (it involves toe hair control)
The Last of New York’s Custom Wigmakers – “I couldn’t close my closets,” he said. “I had more hair than I knew what to do with.”
The Fishy Origins of Human Hair
decolonisation
A bloody difficult woman: Malayalee dancing girl versus the East India Company
Fahmida Riaz, the woman who decolonized feminism
Persian rugs and the aesthetics of whiteness in apartheid South Africa
Fighting fascist democracy: the young radicals of Bangladesh
Remembering the Howard University librarian who decolonised the way books were catalogued
other
Why Soviet Russia Created Mayan Playing Cards
A typographic tour of the signs of Manhattan’s Chinatown – “Should this type of design be considered cultural appropriation, comparable to instances of “yellow face” or a regrettable lower-back tat?”
On Uyghur comedy and cultural citizenship
Charting margins and peripheries in (Asian) independent publishing – “Many of the earliest examples in East and South East Asia can be traced to places where punk music took root, from the Philippines to Indonesia and Japan—not surprisingly, all places with colonial histories and/or other widespread, multi-layered Western influences”
Sex worker, con woman, murderess: the story of Troilokya who terrorised Calcutta in the 1800s
In Iraq, and ancient boardgame is making a comeback
cerulean
The Impossible—But True—Evolutionary Tale of Flatfishes
Agnes Martin finds the light that got lost – “Painting a canvas blue wasn’t enough. It was like dropping a curtain. All along I knew the world went on and on beyond the surface of the thing.”
Treasures from the color archive – “Among those relics is Dragon’s Blood, reputed in antiquity and in the Middle Ages to have got its vividness from the wounds of dragons and elephants locked in mortal combat”