Author: Mathew Ingram

Mozu is a Japanese man who creates intricate model apartments and rooms inside power outlets, complete with furniture. I’ve copied one of the videos in case his account disappears (or Twitter disappears). He also has a YouTube channel.

An interactive feature from a German newspaper showing what parts of Berlin looked like with the Berlin wall, and what the same spots look like now. The aerial photos from 1989 come from the Berlin Senate Department for Urban Development. The more than 700 individual photos were taken six months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, in April. At that time, photographs were only taken over West Berlin and a few hundred meters across the Wall.

Long before the internet and social media, intellectuals kept bits of writing and images and thoughts in “commonplace books,” which they carried with them. John Milton (whose book can been seen here), Sir Isaac Newton, John Locke, Michael Faraday, Mary Wollstonecraft and, later, Virginia Woolf and W.H. Auden all did it. Milton’s commonplace book contains notes on 90 authors in five languages, and, after his wife left him, exhaustive notes on bad marriages. Newton’s books were written in tight, tiny script describing recipes for making coloured pigments. Sir Francis Bacon kept one he called “A Promus of Formularies and Elegancies).

From a Globe and Mail article by Wayne MacPhail: “In 1584, the then-12-year-old English poet John Donne was studying at the University of Oxford along with his younger brother, Henry. This was when the university was just beginning to get its time-burnished reputation. The revered Bodleian Library had not yet opened its doors. But every day, in his tiny Hart Hall room, the young Donne was creating his own private Bodleian in a bit of technology called a commonplace book, or a commonplacer. Donne was the first to use the word, in a sermon in 1631.

So what did people do with these commonplace books? They wrote as they read, widely and deeply. They jotted down scripture, aphorisms, quotes, turns of phrase, gossip, poems, japes and words of wisdom. They let that harvested jumble of disparate brain fodder clang together in a cacophony and chorus of ideas that echoed down the long halls of human thought. The commonplace book was their way to burn the knowledge of the world into their brains, one inkwell dip at a time.”

In 2018, two entrepreneurs — Tom McGeveran and Josh Young — approached Columbia Journalism Review editor and publisher Kyle Pope with a proposition. The two had created a web app called Galley a few years earlier as a kind of anti-Twitter, a place where users could have thoughtful discussions with a group of trusted collaborators. Galley looked more or less like a chat app, but its key feature was the “trust” button, which appeared on everyone’s profile. Once you clicked it, you could then start a discussion and either make it wide open, or restrict it to only those users you had explicitly trusted.

The idea was that conversations could be open to anyone, or they could be restricted. The person who started the conversation was in control, and they could choose specific people to be a part of it, or they could restrict it to only those they chose to trust. Unlike the free-for-all that Twitter discussions often became, no one on Galley had the right to enter your conversation if you didn’t want them to. The idea was to get a free flow of information from as many people as possible, but not at the expense of civility or safety.

Tom and Josh suggested that CJR could use Galley for discussions with readers and journalists, as well as trusted members of the broader community? Josh offered to continue running it and handle all of the back-end software operations if we wanted him to, so Kyle and I discussed it and agreed that it seemed like a worthwhile experiment — and I agreed to work with Josh to get it up and running. Kyle wrote something in November of 2018 introducing Galley as a new forum to talk about journalism: