Richard Spiegel’s article on John Flamsteed gave me an unexpected lesson in etymology. Spiegel writes about the creation of the micrometer but also about the evolution of telescopic sights in the late seventeenth century. Sights like the ones invented in this period are still used by amateur astronomers across the world to align their telescopes with objects in the sky. Many sights still use “crosshairs”—a word so common that I never gave it a second thought. Turns out that term used to be very literal.

Spiegel quotes William Derham’s instructions on building a telescope in 1700: “Between the Object and Eye-glass…place two fine Hairs or Threads across, so as to be seen clearly when you look through the Eye-glass…It is convenient that the Eye-glass and Cross-Hairs or Threads should be lodged in a short lesser Tube by themselves…”

In retrospect, the etymology of “crosshairs” makes entirely too much sense, and I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought about it before. It made me think about how technology influences language, and how words become disconnected from their original meanings over time. Now I’m on the lookout for other barely hidden stories behind everyday words.

When writing about Eileen Gray, I was introduced to Seizo Sugawara. Sugawara was a master lacquer painter working in Paris, France, under whom Gray initially studied. This led to a twenty-year collaboration between the two. So often Gray’s history is told as intertwining with two other men, Jean Baldovici and Le Corbusier, and I was really intrigued by this seemingly positive collaboration she had with Sugawara that didn’t become the better-known narrative about her legacy. Perhaps because it is missing the intrigue and scandal of E-1027?

While working on the story on Gray, I did a bit of a deep dive into Sugawara and became quite interested in his career in Paris, reading what little we do have recorded about it. He arrived in Paris around 1905, accompanying another lacquer master with whom he was studying, and never left. Sugawara became well established in the Japanese community living in Paris at that time and trained other Western artists in addition to Gray. Learning more about Sugawara also made me reflect on how modern architecture is often taught. Like many periods of architectural and art history, we often reflect on the “genius” of the individual and don’t speak enough about design as a collaborative effort. I myself am guilty of this and found learning about Sugawara another reminder to myself to be more aware of how I frame history.

I’ve always celebrated the festival of Diwali as an event marking the return of Lord Rama from exile, as described in the great Hindu epic, the Ramayana. Hence, while writing a recent blog on the history of Diwali as explored through written texts from the sixth century CE to 1945, I was surprised to learn that this wasn’t always the case. The author of the paper, P. K. Gode, authoritatively showed that Diwali was first and foremost a festival that marked the change of season from hot to cold weather. It was always celebrated on a New Moon night, when there’s no moonlight and lamps would be lit in every house, which is why it became known as the “festival of lights.” The agrarian community harvested certain crops at this time and the mercantile community (which included non-Hindus like Jains and Buddhists) prayed to the gods and goddesses of wealth and prosperity. The coronation of Lord Rama as the reason for the celebration of this festival was only mentioned once throughout the paper!

Additionally, the oldest source to reference Diwali was the Kama Sutra—a treatise on love, sexuality, eroticism, and emotional fulfillment, written by sage Vātsyāyana. This text is probably the last place I would have expected to find mention of Diwali, owing to the overtly religious overtones this festival has taken on in recent decades. The change in narrative seems to have been established post the independence of India, proving how history is often re-written according to changing times and the interests of those in power!

Cinema chains like Cathay Cineplexes and Shaw Theatres are a prominent presence in modern Singapore’s shopping mall landscape—no surprise, given their long track record, which includes leading roles as major film studios in the twentieth century. These days, historical Malayan movie studios’ cinematic output is largely associated with classic mid-century films about the vengeful pontianak spirit. Blending horror with romance, those ghost stories “usher[ed] in a new way of thinking about cinema that ‘mediates the transnational, the postcolonial, and the worldly,’” as scholars have argued.

When I set out to learn more about this golden age, however, I discovered that the history of Malay-language cinema in Singapore goes even further back, to as early as 1940—at least a decade before the period that we usually hear about—and, of course, contained plots that went well beyond the pontianak genre. Because many of the early films have been physically lost to time, historian Timothy P. Barnard turns to the five surviving issues of magazine Film Melayu to study how producers, theatergoers, and audiences responded to evolving media technology and mass culture in a time of great social change.

As Barnard’s work shows, cinema culture exists beyond its production and reception on the sound stage and the silver screen. Barnard doesn’t examine the articles in Film Melayu only for their themes and topics. He also gleans fruitful information from details such as the identity of the periodical’s backer and printer—and even the choice of alphabetical script used. His archival dive reminded me that, despite sometimes unavoidable limitations on the resources available, researchers can still find innovative methodological workarounds that yield their own valuable insights.

When I discovered that the author of The Joy of Sex was a notable British anarchist, I did a double take. Was this the same guy? I’m not of the generation that was turned on by Alex Comfort’s enormous best-seller, a seminal text of the suburban sexual revolution of the Seventies—my parents didn’t number it among their books—but I definitely sneaked a peek at it somewhere along the way. Flash forward to this year: I came across Eric Laursen’s The Duty to Stand Aside (2018), which details the young Comfort’s sparing with George Orwell over the morality of airborne bombing in the midst of World War II. Was a war-crime in response to a war-crime legitimate? It is, unfortunately, still a very relevant debate. Of course, in the end, it all made sense: here was a living exemplar of the Sixties slogan “make love, not war.” Only it turned out that Comfort had to learn to make love—he admitted he and his wife knew nothing about sex when they married—after he learned to not make war.

Most of all, writing for JSTOR Daily has made me think about everyday things in new ways. One example of this was my piece “Look Both Ways,” drawing on research on crossing the road in Britain. Such an everyday activity, and yet the blend of laws and cultural habits behind it affect how we move through urban space. Experiencing the same roads at different times as driver and pedestrian, I found myself noticing more, in traffic signals and road design, and thinking about the chain of decisions that give cars or people rights of way.

I also wrote about shopping carts, such a ubiquitous object of urban and suburban daily life. Yet how they became such a fixture wasn’t inevitable. Researching several articles on them, I learned that their use could tell us much more than I had imagined about human behavior.

When I wrote my post on The Master and Margarita, I was going through a phase of utter fascination with Russian culture. While writing, I went on a sort of research frenzy, tracing the book backwards as far as I could go. I learned from said frenzy that the author, Mikhail Bulgakov, was actually an overworked doctor before he ever became a writer, and the stress of his first profession drove him to a fierce addiction to morphine. This is pure speculation, but I wonder if some of the more outlandish scenes from The Master and Margarita may have been Bulgakov’s drug-induced hallucinations, as Jean-Paul Sartre’s fiction was after his experience with mescaline. I also learned that Bulgakov was married three times, and his third wife was the woman who inspired the character of the vengeful mistress, Margarita. This is intriguing additional context; it took him three tries to find the perfect muse. The Master and Margarita remains one of the twentieth-century novels I love the most, and I’ve been struggling to find a version of the recent film adaptation with English subtitles.

As a fan of all things cryptid, and just in time for spooky season, I’ll recall Katherine Churchill’s summer column on the lore of the Jersey Devil. I knew of the creature, but not its origin story as the unlucky thirteenth child of an overburdened mother. I loved her description of the legend as a “coded” tale that can speak to social concerns from environmentalism to misogyny, and I was interested to learn that though the tale had eighteenth-century origins, it gained new popularity and traction in the nineteenth. This makes sense—as America grew in population, size, mass-media penetration and industrial scope, there was reason for was reason for female body horror to have new resonance beyond the idea of a Puritan cautionary tale. Increased legal attention to contraception and abortion, and the anti-vice movements of folks like Anthony Comstock, put accusations of monstrosity onto women who didn’t fit into narrowly moral categories. I was drawn in by Churchill’s suggestion that “the critique of the story falls not on Mother Leeds as a bad mother, but on the circumstances that prevent her from choosing whether to be a mother at all.”

(My favorite cryptid, though, as someone from Connecticut: the glawackus.)

Like so many readers, my naïve understanding was that Cancún was a formerly modest coastal town which had slowly evolved over decades into becoming the major “spring break” draw for many young Americans. How wrong I was. What I learnt was that as recently as 1970, Cancún didn’t exist in any form at all. The population at the start of that decade was estimated to be three, all workers at a coconut plantation.

What followed was one of the most ambitious development projects Mexico has seen to this day. Far from an evolution of an existing town, Cancún was, as I learned, an entirely planned development from the get-go. The Mexican government, along with myriad private contractors, transformed this stretch of yawning coastline from being an all-but-uninhabited plantation into a farrago of skyscrapers, hotels, restaurants and freeways within a decade.

This rapid development has, as I wrote in my piece, not come without unexpected consequences that are, at best, ambivalent, when it comes to preserving indigenous culture and nature. Yet I found myself being bowled over by the sheer chutzpah of the plans to create a tourist fulcrum from nothing but sand and coconuts. It’s a social experiment from a decade where such projects often ended in disaster. For all its faults, Cancún has proven, and is continuing to prove over half a century on from its inception, that it can go the distance.