Sometime in his adolescence, in the 700s, Lu Yu, an aspiring writer and professional clown, had his first taste of tea soup. This probably occurred not far from Lu’s childhood home: a Buddhist monastery that overlooked a scenic lake in Central China. But Lu was unimpressed; he called the soup “ditch water.”
What bothered Lu was not the tea, but all the other ingredients. The offending brew contained scallions, ginger, jujube dates, citrus peels, Dogwood berries, and mint, all of which cooks “threshed” together to make a smooth paste. The result was a chunky soup, or even a sauce.
Lu Yu, in fact, adored tea—he’d go on to become the “tea god” and the world’s greatest tea influencer. But the tea he loved—brewed only from powdered tea leaves, without any other flavoring—was, in the grand sweep of human history, a recent invention. People in Asia, where tea trees are native, ate tea leaves for centuries, perhaps even millennia, before ever thinking to drink it. And it is Lu Yu who is chiefly responsible for making tea drinking the norm for most people around the world.
At first, it looks as though the woman in this video is opening a small door leading down into a basement, but then she flips up a hidden panel in the floor that reveals steps down and around the corner is a tiny, two-storey theatre that dates back to the mid-1800s sometime. As far as I can tell, a wealthy family who lived above the theatre — which is in Ragusa, in Sicily, and is known as the Teatro Donnafugata (Theatre of the Missing Woman) — had a private entrance built that led to their private balcony. Could be related to the nearby Castello Donnafugata, a royal palace that was built by a baron and has 122 rooms.
Sometime in his adolescence, in the 700s, Lu Yu, an aspiring writer and professional clown, had his first taste of tea soup. This probably occurred not far from Lu’s childhood home: a Buddhist monastery that overlooked a scenic lake in Central China. But Lu was unimpressed; he called the soup “ditch water.”
What bothered Lu was not the tea, but all the other ingredients. The offending brew contained scallions, ginger, jujube dates, citrus peels, Dogwood berries, and mint, all of which cooks “threshed” together to make a smooth paste. The result was a chunky soup, or even a sauce.
Lu Yu, in fact, adored tea—he’d go on to become the “tea god” and the world’s greatest tea influencer. But the tea he loved—brewed only from powdered tea leaves, without any other flavoring—was, in the grand sweep of human history, a recent invention. People in Asia, where tea trees are native, ate tea leaves for centuries, perhaps even millennia, before ever thinking to drink it. And it is Lu Yu who is chiefly responsible for making tea drinking the norm for most people around the world.
If there’s one thing Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and TikTok are good at, it’s distributing content and making it go viral, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is no exception to that rule. Every day, there are new images and videos, and some become that day’s trending topic: the video clip of Ukrainian president Zelensky in military fatigues, speaking defiantly about resisting Russia’s attack; photos of Kyiv’s mayor, a six-foot-seven-inch former heavyweight boxing champion, in army fatigues; a man standing in front of a line of Russian tanks, an echo of what happened in China’s Tianenmen Square during an uprising in 1989; the old Ukrainian woman who told Russian soldiers to put sunflower seeds in their pockets, so sunflowers would grow on their graves; the soldiers on Snake Island who told a Russian warship to “fuck off.” The list goes on.
Not surprisingly, some of these viral images are fake, or cleverly designed misinformation and propaganda. But even if the inspiring pictures of Ukrainians rebelling against Russia are real (or mostly real, like the photo of Kyiv’s mayor in army fatigues, which was taken during a training exercise in 2021), what are we supposed to learn from them? They seem to tell us a story, with a clear and pleasing narrative arc: Ukrainians are fighting back! Russia is on the ropes! The Washington Post writes that the social-media wave “has blunted Kremlin propaganda and rallied the world to Ukraine’s side.” Has it? Perhaps. But will any of that actually affect the outcome of this war, or is it just a fairy tale we are telling ourselves because it’s better than the reality?
The virality of the images may drive attention, but, from a journalism perspective, it often does a poor job of representing the stakes and the scale at-hand. Social media is a little like pointillism—a collection of tiny dots that theoretically combine to reveal a broader picture. But over the long term, war defies this kind of approach. The 40-mile long convoy of Russian military vehicles is a good example: frantic tweets about it fill Twitter, as though users are getting ready for some epic battle that will win the war, but the next day the convoy has barely moved. Are some Ukrainians fighting back? Yes. But just because we see one dead soldier beside a burned-out tank doesn’t mean Ukraine is going to win, whatever “win” means. As Ryan Broderick wrote in his Garbage Day newsletter, “winning a content war is not the same as winning an actual war.”
Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer
