The smell of old books comes from lignin, a compound in paper that’s chemically similar to vanilla.
As books age, lignin breaks down and releases vanillin, giving them that nostalgic, slightly sweet scent.
We broke every possible social contract for young people, unprecedented wealth transfer from young to old, devalued the currency, made home prices insane, education debt crazy and now for the lulz we're automating all the entry level white collar work. Just incredible
"the birds in the war zone make nests from the fiber optic cables left by the killer drones" is the kind of thing you'd expect as a throwaway line of background in a cyberpunk story, and yet
When asked why great Gothic cathedrals are no longer built, 19th-century poet Heinrich Heine explained:
"The men of old times had convictions; we modern men have only opinions, and more than these are needed to raise cathedrals."
In 1919, Wittgenstein renounced his inheritance and became a gardener at a monastery in Hütteldorf, near Vienna. Around this time, leading intellectuals began to distance themselves from him, claiming he had gone mad and turned into a mystic.