das münchner abkommen

On this day—with negotiations continuing through the night and on to the next morning—in 1938 Italian il Duce Benito Mussolini, France’s Prime Minister Édouard Daladier and British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain met with Adolf Hitler at a conference in Munich to lend a façade of legitimacy to Nazi Germany’s long-standing goal of annexing the newly-coined territory of the Sudetenland, lands with an ethnic Germany majority along the borders with the also freshly minted Czechoslovakia.
Despite the conspicuous absence of any representation of the Soviet Union or the Czech government or outlandish claims including Czechoslovakia being accused of plotting to exterminate the Sudeten Germans and being characterised as a vassal state of France created for the express purpose of being a base of operations for the French armed forces to overrun and finally vanquish Germany, afterward Chamberlain praised the summit as heralding “peace in our time,” though many others (including president Edvard Beneš and the Czech people) saw it as a dangerous and precedential tactic of appeasement. German diaspora who had mostly set up trading operations in Hapsburg lands suddenly found themselves in foreign lands after World War I and the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, bereft of much of the freedoms and privilege (reportedly) accorded to Prussian subjects prior. Because of the nature of their import/export business, these Germans living abroad were more affected than the native populations by the economic downturn of the Great Depression and their demands for autonomy—with the backing of the German government—became more and more shrill.

social confirmation

An important and timely instalment of Hidden Brain explores how a movement, a reckoning erupts as a cultural moment and the insufferable becomes no longer tolerated through overcoming or redirecting the discouraging mechanism of social or behavioural confirmation bias that reinforces grudgingly accepted norms by making us blind to the brittleness of custom and to the fortitude of our own convictions and has an interesting post-script, an unsung hero in the figure of Tarana Burke. After interviewing young survivors of sexual violence, Burke found herself without words but gathered resources over the next decade, founded an outreach network and gave her movement a name: Me Too. Another decade later, solidarity reached critical mass and the slogan championed behind a hash tag became a unifying message that the future is not going to look like the past.

tituli picti or norman consequence

On this in 1066, the forces of William, Duke of Normandy (previously) crossed the English Channel (la Manche) and established a beachhead at Pevensey, East Sussex, in order to dispute the claim to the Anglo-Saxon throne by King Harold Godwinson, precipitated by the extinction the Wessex line with the death of Edward the Confessor, who died without issue.
Harold’s elevation was challenged on three separate from by the Norwegian sovereign Harald Hardrada and Harold’s own brother Tostig—whom were repelled divisively (but at a great cost of men and materiel) under the Battle of Stamford Bridge in Yorkshire on the twenty-fifth of September, but eventually fell to William’s armies at the Battle of Hastings on the fourteenth of October. Norman troop frustrated when their advances were stopped at first and were unable to penetrate English front lines adopted a tactic of pretending to retreat and then—more agile—turn back on their pursuers.

horizontal transaction or gini coeffienct

Building on the central tenets of chartalism, the belief that legal tender was created out of a ruler’s or government’s desire to direct economic activity through currency manipulation and trade rather than as a solution to make barter and exchange more portable and imperishable, Planet Money introduces us to a school of thought styled Modern Monetary Theory, an macroeconomic idea that one’s pocket change is very different than fiat money and that a country that produces and controls its own currency can fully fund all the goods and services it wishes. Provided it is not indebted with loans in a foreign currency or is not able to create more money (like individual member states of the European Union), it cannot go bankrupt. Rather than to generate revenue for the government, taxation is an effective means to regulate inflation and unemployment. It’s a provocative argument surely and some would call it naïve to diminish the role of inflation but it seems that economies are doing this all the time. Do give he episode a listen and let us know what you make of the compelling question and answers.

7x7

yokohama-e: early depictions of Westerns (previously) by Japanese illustrators—via the Everlasting Blört

uncanny valley: the secret (related) and sometimes glamourous life of fashion mannequins

periodicals: the Avocado has a regular column on reading vintage and antique magazines—via Things Magazine

spriting: fun and informative pixel-art animation tutorials

millinery: curating the illustrations of Joanna Spicer to celebrate the hatmaking industry of Stockport

reading room: Massimo Listri’s amazing photography of European libraries

what-ifs: illustrator Tom Stults envisions films created in another time and place