A Panorama of Design

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A look at design-world events, products and people.

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The Origins of the Word “Gaslighting”: Scenes from the 1944 Film

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You’re not going out of your mind. You’re slowly and systematically being driven out of your mind. —  Joseph Cotton  to  Ingrid Bergman  in the 1944 film  Gaslight . Remember when the word “gaslighting” elicited knowing nods from black and white film buffs… and blank stares from pretty much everyone else? Then along came 2016, and gaslighting entered the lexicon in a big way. Merriam-Webster  defines  it as the “psychological manipulation of a person usually over an extended period of time that causes the victim to question the validity of their own thoughts, perception of reality, or memories and typically leads to confusion, loss of confidence and self-esteem, uncertainty of one’s emotional or mental stability, and a dependency on the perpetrator.” Of course, you knew that already! “Gaslighting” is unavoidable these days, five years after it was named 2016’s “most useful” and “likely to succeed” word by the  American Dialect Society ....
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The First Air Raid Happened When Austria Dropped Bombs on Venice from Pilotless Hot-Air Balloons (1849)

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We surround the phrase “ahead of its time” with a mystical aura. But just because an idea shows up earlier than we expect does not mean it was ever a good idea for human progress. Take, for example, the idea to rain incendiary devices on the heads of civilian populations in wartime. Recent iterations of this technology — unmanned drones surgically bombing weddings and funerals — may be an improvement over Hiroshima or napalm-happy helicopter pilots like Apocalypse Now’s Bill Kilgore. But drones have not, thereby, rendered the nuclear option or trigger-happy death from above obsolete, or made mass civilian casualties less tragic and unnecessary, comparisons of raw numbers aside. Drone bombing is one of those ideas that showed up ahead of its time — at the very first use of aerial bombing of any kind. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) were launched in the service of a military operation 30 years before Edison harnessed electricity for home use. In 1849, remote piloting was hardly po...
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The Medieval Masterpiece, the Book of Kells, Has Been Digitized and Put Online

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If you know nothing else about medieval European illuminated manuscripts, you surely know the Book of Kells. “One of Ireland’s greatest cultural treasures” comments Medievalists.net, “it is set apart from other manuscripts of the same period by the quality of its artwork and the sheer number of illustrations that run throughout the 680 pages of the book.” The work not only attracts scholars, but almost a million visitors to Dublin every year. “You simply can’t travel to the capital of Ireland,” writes Book Riot’s Erika Harlitz-Kern , “without the Book of Kells being mentioned. And rightfully so.” The ancient masterpiece is a stunning example of Hiberno-Saxon style, thought to have been composed on the Scottish island of Iona in 806, then transferred to the monastery of Kells in County Meath after a Viking raid (a story told in the marvelous animated film The Secret of Kells ). Consisting mainly of copies of the four gospels, as well as indexes called “canon tables,” the manuscrip...
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