St. Valentine Beheaded, ♥ Shapes, and A Pale Blue Dot
Who was Saint Valentine? And why was he beheaded?
Paul Ratner | Big Think | February 12, 2018 | No paywall
The murky history of St. Valentine (there were at least two), a Pagan fertility festival, whipping women with goat carcasses, and large scale greeting card production. (913 words)
A Heart-Shaped History
Iain Gately | Lapham’s Quarterly | February 14, 2010 | No paywall
How the ♥ icon became shorthand for love.
"The ♥ shape has represented a variety of things across different cultures over time, ranging from genitalia to cosmic wisdom; the heart, meanwhile, was an enigmatic organ for most of history, whose biological function was not understood until 1628; and the emotion of love, if associated with flesh instead of mind or spirit, was equally likely to be linked to the eyes, the head, or the liver as to the heart." (2,793 words)
Literary curiosities and vintage cards from Valentine’s Days of yore
Sammy Jay | Lit Hub | February 12, 2021 | No paywall
“After a difficult year, with people kept apart for too long, this selection celebrates that which has always connected us, and will help in bringing us back together again. Harking back to the gestures of lovers past might inspire the authentic Valentine’s gesture you never knew you needed.” (542 words)
A Pale Blue Dot
Carl Sagan | Planetary Society | 1990
This is where we live, on A Pale Blue Dot. The humbling experience of astronomy as described by astronomer Carl Sagan.
“That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” (585 words)
🎥 Watch: The Voyagers
Penny Lane | July 4, 2010 | No paywall
“The Voyagers, an experimental documentary by Penny Lane, tells the story of the NASA project to launch two spacecraft carrying golden records holding a wealth of human culture into space in 1977. Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 pioneered research of the far reaches of our solar system and continue to hurtle further into outer space today. In the process of putting together these time capsules of human experience, Carl Sagan and the project's creative director, Annie Druyan, fell in love. Their story resonated with Lane, who created this very personal take on it for her own wedding, as a meditation on the nature of love in an uncertain universe.”
– Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg for The Atlantic
Watch The Voyagers here (16:28 min).
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