Arc 2 on The Approximate Mind

The Selector and the Composer

Tue, 26 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

TAM-EAR.2-01 · The Standard with Ears · The Approximate Mind

Platt Rogers Spencer was born in 1800 in upstate New York, the youngest of eleven, and the family was poor enough that paper was not something a boy practiced on. He practiced on birch bark, on snow, on the leather covers of the few books in the house, and, after the family moved to the shore of Lake Erie, on the sand of the beach, where he could write as large as he wanted and the lake took it back by morning. He was seven or eight when he started. What he was working out, tracing ovals and curves with a stick, was a theory of handwriting derived from the shapes he saw around him: the line of a wave, the curve of a pebble, the angle of a wind-bent stem.

The Query Box

Tue, 26 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

TAM-EAR.2-02 · The Standard with Ears · The Approximate Mind

In December of 1896, Solomon Schechter, reader in Talmudic literature at Cambridge, climbed a ladder at the end of the women’s gallery in the Ben Ezra synagogue in Old Cairo and looked through a hole in the wall. The hole was the only entrance to a chamber that had no door, no window, and no floor plan reason to exist, and the chamber was full nearly to the ceiling with paper.

The Body in the Data

Tue, 26 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

TAM-EAR.2-03 · The Standard with Ears · The Approximate Mind

In 1884, on a walled lot beside the veterinary hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Eadweard Muybridge built a shed a hundred and twenty feet long, painted its interior black, and gridded the back wall with white threads at five-centimeter intervals. Along the front he set banks of cameras, twelve, then twenty-four, wired to trip in sequence. He was fifty-four, English, famous for having photographed a galloping horse with all four feet off the ground and settling a bet about it, and famous for other things too, and the university had brought him to Philadelphia to do systematically what he had done for the horse: catch the body in the act of moving.

The Face of the Standard

Tue, 26 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

TAM-EAR.2-04 · The Standard with Ears · The Approximate Mind

In a small studio in Chicago in 1928, two white men sat at one microphone and performed, between them, an entire Black neighborhood. Freeman Gosden was from Richmond, Charles Correll from Peoria; they had met working for a company that staged amateur shows, and the program they built, fifteen minutes a night, was called Amos ’n’ Andy. Gosden and Correll wrote every episode and voiced every character, the leads, the lodge brothers, the wives, the strangers, one throat trading off with another, and the show became the largest thing broadcasting had ever produced. At its peak the estimates run to forty million listeners a night, in a country of a hundred and twenty million. Movie houses stopped their films at seven and piped the broadcast into the auditorium, because a theater that let the show go unheard lost the evening’s audience to its own lobby.