Category: blog

[estimated reading time 2 minutes]

as mina rounded the corner on her way home from another unfulfilling day at college, she was confronted by the silhouette of her grandmother bent on the ground, face almost touching the grass in front of the house. she burst into a run and, within a few meters of her grandmother, suddenly stopped and began staring. she hadn’t collapsed. she was actively searching for something but obviously not finding it.

grandma, i’m home. i’ll help you look.

her grandmother’s face began to shine with pleasure to see mina and she was obviously relieved because her eyesight left much to be desired and young eyes should have guaranteed success.

i’m glad you’re here! now i’ll be able to find my glasses.

you dropped your glasses out here?

no. i dropped them in the living room. but it’s so dark in there i can’t see. out here it’s bright so i have a chance of finding them.

–

this is a traditional buddhist story about enlightenment. a diligent search in the light, however well-intentioned and devoted, will never lead to wisdom or understanding. enlightenment is impossible unless we confront and accept not only the light, the happiness and goodness in ourselves but the darkness and confusion, the suffering and imbalance found there, too.

mina’s grandmother is putting a lot of effort into her search and she is doing it where there is an excellent chance of finding something — the problem is that she won’t find what she’s looking for there, though perhaps she will discover something else. this could lead to confusion in many ways. the first is that she will eventually become discouraged and disinterested by her fruitless search. the other is that she may mistake whatever she finds for the object of her search — her glasses in this case or enlightenment in ours.

what buddhism preaches is revolutionary acceptance. not simply accepting the good but looking deeply at the darkness and problems in our lives and understanding that we will have to start from wherever we are rather than fighting against the things that are already true and present around us. if we don’t accept the situation, we will be locked in a struggle with reality and reality always wins. when we accept it, it doesn’t mean we have to see our current place as good, only recognize it as true. from that moment of acceptance, we start looking in the right place for our enlightenment — the place where we are.

[estimated reading time 29 minutes]

you think you understand and that’s great. but here’s the real question — can you teach it? there is an old saying. “those who can’t do teach.” it’s sadly true in many cases but the truth of the matter is actually on a totally different axis. those who teach understand. no, not that those who are teaching things have the deepest understanding — those who have taught them understand them better.

and i don’t mean people in the education system. i mean students. when you’re learning, the hardest thing is often to take the things you understood when you were told, listening or reading them in a theoretical sense, and turning them into practical, useful knowledge. i’m sure you’ve experienced this disconnect. you sit in a classroom for hours and everything makes perfect sense. you’re shocked how much you got. and you’re even more shocked by the fact you didn’t automatically know it before. it all seemed so easy and comprehensible and obvious. now you know. and as soon as you go to your friend’s house after the lecture and they ask you what you were studying, you start to tell them. they’re excited and ask questions and you … simply draw a blank. you have no idea. what seemed clear only an hour or two before is so far from your grasp you can’t even give the most basic explanation.

what’s happened? has your memory failed you? are you really that bad at trying to remember basic information in context that you don’t know what was explained not days but hours earlier? not in the slightest. i mean, your memory might be absolute shit but that’s a whole other matter. what’s really happened is that the information has never truly solidified in your mind and that’s an easy problem to solve. instructors have spent centuries trying to crack this problem. they ask spontaneous questions, give in-class quizzes and drill people repetitively in front of their peers, usually leading not to better understanding or deeper memory-penetration but embarrassment for students, which is, even more painfully, exactly the reason many instructors continue to do it, despite it simply not working.

why doesn’t it work? because memory is write-only. when things are taken from outside, they’re written in our memories but they don’t get reaccessed until the next need to write them — read isn’t really a thing for memory unless we’re dreaming. as much as this is difficult to understand, this example might help.

you can’t remember something. a detail. someone’s name. you try and try and minutes go by. a few hours later, you still haven’t remembered but your friend asks you who you were thinking about earlier and their name immediately comes as you are speaking your answer. you had to “write” the information and it has been retrieved by your memory-on-demand system. that’s how it works. if you request the information, you’re not going to get it. but if you need the information for a practical purpose — like communicating it or forming a dream — it will be there. there’s a side-effect, though. the next time you remember it, it will be written to your memory again. this is why memory drills are so useful — rote learning really does work, though it’s often a slow way of doing it because the same information repeated is less useful as a storage method than information with its context.

but what does that mean for practical learning? we’re not going to be there in front of a class teaching the entire introductory organic-chemistry course we’re sitting through. unless we become professors. and that’s a long way off and we’d better have learned it long before that point or the rest of the courses in the degree aren’t likely to make much sense. there has to be a better way.

well, there are several ways. flashcards are probably the most obvious triggers for memory and they’re incredibly-useful. but there’s a far better way — a way that doesn’t require someone to ask you questions and interpret your answers. what’s the simplest way to get thorough understanding of information? blog about it.

i know that’s going to sound really strange but hear me out.

it doesn’t have to be the place you share your darkest secrets — if you have such a place, this might need to be a different place. you can get a free blogging account from many sources, though i recommend wordpress because it’s simple and has been around for years and just works without problems unless you’re trying to do something complicated. and it’s free for this. sure, you’ll have to pay money if you want to do something more public and involved and get a domain and custom graphics and stuff. but this is for learning. don’t get fancy. just shut up and write.

so start a blog for each course you’re taking. let’s say you’re taking a basic course in modern history. i’ll use it as an example because it’s my favorite course to teach. so you go to wordpress and you log in (cause you probably have a wordpress account already and if you don’t i have no idea where you’ve been living without wanting to write before — put down the fucking pen and join the twentieth century a few decades too late) and tell it you want a new blog. it’ll take you a few minutes and you can play with a few visual settings and get the thing to be nice and pretty but you really can just start immediately with the basic blogging interface and write your first post. it’ll ask you what you want and you can literally just type “jean’s history 1000 notes”. or you can get creative. “exploring first-year history with shannon” or “dive into the recent past with kirstie”. be as funky as you like but start the blog. then you end up staring at an empty screen. you don’t know what to write.

but wait. you took notes, right? if you have a good instructor, they didn’t let you take notes. i don’t. i give the notes printed in point form and provide detailed ones online. and that’s great. but i don’t expect students to read them. i expect students to write them. no, not copy them verbatim. that would be stupid. i’ve seen people who want to be novelists do that. take whole books written by other writers they want to emulate and copy them completely by hand. it’s a ridiculous practice. sure, it’ll work. but it’s a bad way to use your time when there’s something far more beneficial and no more time-consuming. write your own version.

let’s take the first class of an introductory history course and write a short blog article. copy the entire contents of the first class’ notes into your article then start at the top rewording it. it will feel strange taking something that’s already, in theory, written perfectly-well and turning it into something else. but the point is you’re stimulating your memory by forcing it to write the information again after you’ve already written it once. you’re guaranteeing long-term storage in your memory this way in a way reading or listening simply can’t do. you can do this for any course, of course. but we’ll start with this one. here’s the basic outline — you should make one if your instructor hasn’t given one for the class before you take their paragraphs and reword them.

by the way, keep your answers short. don’t try to write two or three thousand words about a single idea. divide it. never write more than a few hundred words on something without shifting to a new question. if the question requires more than that, split it in pieces — as many pieces as you can. if you can get detailed enough to write only three or four sentences then go to the next thing, it will flow far more easily. this is a good way to do all your writing but especially writing about topics you haven’t mastered yet. you won’t drift off-topic. and you’ll be able to focus more easily on communicating the information rather than getting sidetracked into self-delusion or opinions.

this is an example from the most recent version of my introductory contemporary-history course (generally called history 1000 or something similar at most colleges) that starts about 1900 and goes to today. this is, of course, only the introductory lecture so there’s not much detailed historical knowledge in it. you’re welcome to browse through the rest of the course notes for this or any other course i teach. they’re not restricted only to my students. i don’t see any reason to prevent knowledge from being shared. i get paid exactly the same amount to teach it regardless of how many people read the notes and i put in exactly the same amount of effort — for greater reward with each pair of eyes.

i’m going to do exactly the exercise with my publicly-available notes that i suggest you do for every class of every course you take from now until the end of time. it’s worth it. you won’t have to study nearly as much. or at all. while you might be able to remember the information well-enough for an exam if you can’t teach it, if you can teach it, you’ll know it far more intimately and that memory won’t fade the way batch-learning as a recipient does.

let’s begin with that outline.

• why study history?
• what is history? can anything be true?
• what is revisionism and is it always bad?
• what’s so important about the contemporary period?
• why is the last century (or so) different from the rest of the human past?
• why do we go to war?
• why do wars end? do they ever really?
• how do we determine who was on the right side of a conflict?
• what’s the difference between history and current affairs?
• what can history tell us about the future?

i generally split all my lectures into a series of short sections that last between ten and fifteen minutes — for a three-hour course that happens once a week, this works out to be about ten or twelve point. for a one-hour lecture, that’s probably five. each one can be subdivided but it’s a good place to start. given how useful this is as a way to organize, i think everyone should start their writing this way, especially if they’re writing something like notes or nonfiction. fiction can be far more fluid and flexible. but notes are meant to be organized. without organization, they’re not notes. they’re just a verbal cluster-fornication. and that, despite its name, is no fun at all.

if you’re not interested in history, this might get a little boring for you. but if you’re not interested in history you should be ashamed of yourself. and of your teachers. because history is nothing but the story of humans. and if you’re not interested in what humans are doing what exactly is happening in your day? if teachers have made history boring with detailed, meaningless facts and numbers (dates, populations, distances, casualties), that’s not history. that’s just knowledge-gatekeeping. tell them to fuck off. history is about telling stories and understanding the past as a way to prepare for the future. the details are fine but they’re only useful once you already understand. they’re not the path to knowledge. only the side-effect of having so throughly understood you want more. more history has been hated by students learning from teachers who want to share statistics than by any other purpose — likely including those who have lived through some of its darker periods.

with your outline created, turn each of those into headings and work your way through the provided notes. just keep moving and turn each new paragraph into one of your own explaining the same information in your own words. you don’t have to be creative but you certainly can be. if you find something interesting, make a little note to yourself to come back and add more details later. it wouldn’t surprise me if a few of these topics become populated with five or ten or more subtopics and you go diving in wikipedia or other sources to find more details to add simply because you’re interested. but don’t do that during the initial transformation process. you want this to be relatively fast and unencumbered — if it takes you ten hours to complete it, you’re going to stop doing it. separate your research-from-personal-interest-time from the process of solidifying your memory after class and it will be much easier to see the positive results.

what follows here for the next few pages is actually a notes summary like i would suggest you write for this class. i won’t comment throughout on how to do it. just write whatever you think best communicates what you heard in class and read on the screen in the existing notes. imagine your audience is your best friend. be generous with the information but don’t assume they’re stupid. just be accurate and talk to them like someone you know well. i will, of course, write this as if i’m speaking it in a classroom situation. so should you. go off on asides because they’ll help you remember. don’t be afraid to wander. just make sure you get all the information from the source paragraph and all is good. when you’re finished, you can even come back and read it — make your own recordings and listen to them later or share them with someone else who might be interested. now you’re learning by teaching.

why study history?

there are two reasons history is a useful thing to study — enjoyment and practical knowledge. the best part about history is that it’s both the expression of searching for real information and a narrative. if either is missing, it’s not history. as humans, we love storytelling. we share what happened in our days and what we hope to have for the future. we talk about others (gossip) and ask about our friends and their families. we want stories — humans have an insatiable desire for narrative detail. while we may not be interested in how many, how long, how much or precisely when, we simply can’t get enough of “what happened next?”. every movie you watch, show you stream and novel you read is an exploration of a human story. even if the characters are cute animated kittens. it’s all about how human life unfolded and you’re watching with rapt attention, waiting for the next thing to occur. this is history. the stories of the past we tell in historical exploration are no different from those portrayed in novels and movies and drunken-retellings all over the world every day. the difference is actually quite subtle — we do it not just for entertainment but with a second purpose, perhaps a more-important primary purpose and this is the side-effect.

the other purpose is predictive. you might be told it’s not, that history is meant to be an objective exploration of the past for no purpose other than awareness. that’s nothing more than bullshit academic garbage and anyone who says such a thing should be repeatedly shot then encouraged to swallow their own words. we might study because the information is interesting but if that’s all we’re doing we might as well just watch a movie. it’s far easier and the story will probably be far easier to understand. no. we study history to learn how to face the future. what? history? in the future? of course. we don’t look at hitler and think “wow that was sad” — well, we might but there’s more to it than that. we look at hitler and think “how do we make sure that never happens again?” — we look at the mistakes made in the past and use them as determiners for how to avoid them in the future.

there is a famous saying — “those who forget the past are destined to repeat it”. there’s a debate about who said it first but, given how old his teachings are, it’s likely to have been laozi. maybe someone said it before him. hard to tell. but it’s very true. we will continually make mistakes the past has already seen and recovered from (hopefully) unless we are aware of them and see them coming the next time. how do we stop antisemitism? we see the warning signs before yellow stars and broken windows replace snide comments and bitter asides on the street. how do we avoid plagues? we see them coming, assume there will be another every few years and make sure we teach people about personal responsibility and protective equipment.

these are concrete examples of things we have collectively ignored from our recent past — the rise of nazism in the thirties and the spanish flu pandemic of the earliest decades of the twentieth century are cautionary tales that could easily have prevented much of the suffering and misery of the rise of populism in the early twenty-first century and the novel coronavirus pandemic it spawned. people chose to forget history and it came back to bite them not only in the asses but in the genitals. and they pretend it’s the first time — there’s nothing new in our lives, practically-speaking. just slightly-modified things from the past. indian culture talks about karma but it’s a simple equation — everything we do has many causes and many consequences. nothing that happens happens in a vacuum and whatever we do was influenced by thousands, millions of events in the past and will at-least-partially-cause millions, even billions of events in the future — something as simple as the decision between fruit and oats for breakfast might have knock-on consequences for the rest of your life — leaving five minutes earlier could be the difference between saving someone’s life on the street and being hit by a drunk-driver or falling off a bridge in a sudden windstorm or randomly seeing an ad for your next job, your biggest life-changing event. history is being prepared for the future so we know what to do when it comes.

and it’s good if you ever want to be on jeopardy, of course.

what is history? can anything be true?

history is an understanding of the past. no. it’s not the understanding of the past. it’s not the sum of all things that happened. it’s not the truth about the past and it’s not objective information from past times. it’s what we think happened combined with why we think it did. objectivity is a myth. all information is biased and subjective but that doesn’t mean we can’t try to make sense of it and construct a coherent narrative. but it’s important we remember history isn’t about truth. it’s not about discovery. it’s about building a story from blocks that may be real but whose veracity isn’t important. it’s the lessons it teaches us about the future that are significant. does history have to be true to be useful? not at all. actually, modified, theoretical history is often far more useful in figuring out what to do — “what if” history is something many historians mock but, remembering why we study history — to teach us how to react to the future — it makes perfect sense.

an example to illustrate why details don’t matter and truth is irrelevant to the lesson it teaches.

there is a story about a girl and her family. her name is rachel (later other things but we’ll just call her that) and she lived in paris with her parents and sister. when war began, she suddenly became aware she was jewish. she’d never really thought about it before because she was only six — her older sister, a whole eight, hadn’t really noticed much about it, either. her parents thought they were fully-assimilated and it wouldn’t matter but french society soon shifted as the germans poured in and paris was falling around them. her father, a strong member of the community, thought he would be safe and didn’t escape to america as many of his culturally-aligned friends were doing. it was too late. the roundups were beginning in paris and there was no way onto a ship. taking his gold to a friend at the bank where they worked, he arranged to leave his home and bring his three female family members, too, taking up residence in their attic. it was a huge risk for them all — both families could be sent to the camps. but it was a good investment on all sides and it began.

after a year of close-quarters living, rachel and her family were suffering from malnutrition and the side-effects of staying locked in an attic twenty-four-hours-a-day without escape or fresh air or, in most cases, real light. there was a tiny window in the attic and on this particular evening rachel saw snow for the first time in a year. it was the middle of the night and she couldn’t sleep because she was so hungry — rationing for a family of four was hard to share with a family of eight and it wasn’t even enough for four. she was entranced by it as she crawled down the ladder from the attic to go to the bathroom — something she did as slowly as possible to allow herself to escape the confined space. she didn’t understand why she had to stay there and why she couldn’t see her friends. but she knew she had to be quiet. seeing a cat on the roof just outside the bathroom window shivering in the cold, she remembered her mother’s lesson about always helping those weaker, that this is the duty of all life. she opened the window and crawled out on the roof, cradling the frozen kitten in her lap as she sat on the frozen ledge.

unaware of the light in the house across the alley, she was a malnourished ghost-girl in the moonlight holding the kitten and speaking softly to it in hebrew as her mother had for her when she was scared in the night. there was a sudden noise and the light went out. the cat jumped from her hands and landed on the ground, finally warm and able to run. she knew she had made a mistake but wasn’t sure what it was, crawling back in the window. she hadn’t gone outside. not really. the roof had to be safe and she climbed the ladder and tried to sleep. the whole next day she said nothing but couldn’t even eat the tiny portions she was given, complaining of pain. that night, she knew something would happen. the noise from the neighborhood that came with darkness, people being rounded-up and taken away to a constant background of screaming and yelling in multiple languages and usually passed in the streets in a few hours got closer and there was a knock on the door.

her father’s friend opened the attic and told them it was too late. the germans were coming. they might be able to save rachel but the others were impossible. they pretended she was their own child but the german soldiers dragged her parents and older sister to a processing facility. that was the last she saw of them. they likely never knew why they were found after so long safe in hiding. her family was torn from her because she had been kind to a helpless kitten on a frozen night.

this story is history. it teaches us a huge amount about how the holocaust happened in france. but is it true? no. does that matter? absolutely not.

nothing is really true unless it’s logical. really logical. 1+1=2. this is true. gravity pulls things together as a function of mass and distance. also true. what happened yesterday is a matter of perception. history is our personal best-guess at what happened and why. we can use this to create a narrative of the past and learn better ways to deal with the future. whether it’s true or not doesn’t matter. it just has to do two things to be functional history — it must be logical and it must be a useful lesson. historic truth is imaginary. but useful history doesn’t have to be true, only feel possible and sensible to teach us about our future.

what is revisionism and is it always bad?

revisionism is taking things from the past and pretending they didn’t happen — or that they happened differently. the common target for this is genocide. groups that wish to imagine genocide didn’t happen often create new narratives. and it’s important to remember that, while history isn’t objectively about truth, it is important to base history on logical information. if someone died, they died. if someone didn’t die — well, they didn’t die.

the point about history not being truth isn’t to ignore facts. it’s that the facts alone tell us nothing and we have to have the narrative. we must take the facts and build something that teaches us understanding and a useful lesson. in the case of the story, we know rachel was a real girl and her family was taken to a german death camp in 1941 where her parents were gassed on arrival and her sister eventually died of disease. the germans were meticulous record-keepers if not good humans. we know she continued to live and spent most of her life known by the family name of her father’s kind-hearted friend who sheltered them and eventually treated her as one of their own children — the neighbor knew she wasn’t one of theirs because they only had two boys, both much older.

if you don’t know something, you’re not pretending. but if you know something is true and try to mislead yourself and others, that’s lying. it’s dishonesty. and there is no greater human evil. turning dishonesty into history is “revisionism” — a fancy word because putting a fancy word on something makes it sound more respectable. revisionists pretend the holocaust didn’t happen despite there being myriad records. they pretend the crusades were about religion rather than greed. they pretend koreans weren’t forcibly made prostitutes for soldiers in the war, that they actually worked in factories for the invading army. they pretend genocide was actually war with both sides fighting and one losing more heavily despite them being mostly unarmed civilians, children included.

accepting that history is a combination of objective fact and “our best attempt at truth” is necessary. pretending the fact that history isn’t true justifies dishonesty about the things we truly do know is manipulative and wrong.

making a mistake about the past isn’t necessarily a bad thing. intentionally rewriting history to make it sound more like you wish it had been teaches you nothing about the future and destroys the potential benefit from studying it. sometimes we need to ask questions about “what if this was different” and question the sources. but ignoring information and basic statistical facts is never good.

it’s important to remember revisionism occurs in all periods and from all sides. often at the same time. you will hear revisionist palestinian history saying “the jews destroyed our homeland where we lived since the beginning of time” — no. it’s not true. they weren’t there that long and most left hoping to escape a war zone, not because they were driven out. they knew armies were coming and didn’t want to get trapped in the middle. on the other side, some jewish revisionists tell another story, “no palestinians were forced from their homes and they all left voluntarily” — also completely false. as with most things in history, the real story is somewhere in the middle with both sides doing terrible things and pretending they weren’t. most people on both sides of the conflict were innocent and did nothing wrong. but so much pain was caused in both directions. it doesn’t help anyone to pretend about it, though. knowing the truth teaches us important lessons. ignoring the truth is why the problem is still ongoing all these years later.

what’s so important about the contemporary period?

human history has accelerated through its entire existence. from the dawn of human existence, tens of thousands of years ago, to the rise of urban social culture in the last five thousand to industrialization and globalization in the last few hundred to the rise of technology and ubiquitous connectivity in only the last few decades, what once took millennia to change now takes years or even days. what took months to walk takes days to ride, hours to drive, minutes to fly and seconds to experience on a videochat. the world was once slow because it was disparate. it’s not tiny because any distance is only a few seconds to cover in our minds and with our words and eyes. the contemporary historical period, from the beginning of the twentieth century to today, is when we experience the rapid acceleration of the birth of modern communications technology and its impact on the world. from the rise of the telegraph through radio, broadcast-media and telephony to the birth of the internet and dominance of social-media as a replacement for culture, we have seen a greater shift in earth and its human population in the past 120 years than in the previous 120 000. we may be the same species as our great-great-grandparents but our daily lives are as different from their as theirs were from their primate ancestors of a million years before. nearly our entire existences are composed of tasks and thoughts that would have been unthinkable and incomprehensible to even those three or four generations ago — it not magic, certainly scientific-impossibility.

beyond the sheer volume and scope of change, studying the last century gives us most of the useful lessons from history without having to go deeper into the past. we see wars of conquest, greed and hate. we see racism, fascism, totalitarianism, control, revolution, manipulation, deceit, conflicts of ideology and religion as an excuse for everything. we see nations rise and collapse, cold and hot conflicts, proxy wars and intelligence services using information as weapons. we see pandemics and genocides, natural disasters and great discoveries. everything that’s happened in human history can be understood from the perspective of studying only the last century. the previous ages are absolutely useful. but you can get a solid foundation and coherent set of lessons for the future from this period and no earlier period has such a wealth of experience to share.

why is the last century (or so) different from the rest of the human past?

the last century is different because it is the last century. the next century will be different for the same reason. history is progressive. that doesn’t mean the future is an improvement on the past. it simply means the future is the result of the past. history accelerates over time. each new development makes more developments possible. building a car was hard but building millions was easy. the first guns were primitive and far-less-effective than swords but they were perfected over time to become the feared weapons we know today. computers were primitive at first but now the cycle of development has accelerated to the point where last year’s technology is nearly worthless in the minds of most young people who desperately desire new phones and tablets.

there are other things we acquired in the last century that are fundamental shifts in history. it is the first time the majority of people stopped having to rely on religion for the source of information and knowledge about the world. science isn’t a new concept but bringing education and science to the masses is a revolutionary idea that shifted so much of human experience and it happened in the last hundred years.

the rise of virtualized experience is hugely-important — information is no longer something that takes paper and can only exist in one physical place. we live in a world of information where only a hundred years ago we lived in a world of paper records. the significance of a data-driven society can’t be understated.

the nuclear age appeared in the middle of the twentieth century and changed the nature of conflict. while damage had been done to the environment for thousands of years, the scale of the damage and its impact on humanity became decisive in the last hundred years in a way it simply wasn’t.

these aren’t things that will go away in the next century of human existence but they are fundamental changes in the way humans lived, movement from how they lived for many thousands of years to how they will live for the next thousand or more. information as a way of seeing the world is a whole new approach to human interaction. science and technology were always important but before the twentieth century most people lived lives barely different from their ancestors in the times of ancient egypt and mesopotamia. warfare was, before the last hundred or so years, something fought between military groups and shifted to something including the whole population with disastrous impacts for everyone involved. these aren’t shifts that can be done more than once. whatever changes in the next century, these are already done and can’t be repeated. will the next century see larger shifts? it’s very likely. but it’s impossible to predict what they will be — it will likely involve technology, discoveries and social elements that simply haven’t even been thought of yet. for now, we can look back a hundred years and learn all we need to know if we pay attention.

why do we go to war?

there are two reasons to go to war — hate and desire. it has become popular to talk about the sanskrit word for war (there are actually two — yuddham, loosely meaning “fighting”, and “gavisti”, a desire for cows) and how understanding it teaches us myriad lessons about the nature of war. they usually mean “a desire for cows” when they say this but both words say a lot about why war happens.

sometimes we go to war because we hate people. for example, most of the battles of the cold war were about a generalized hatred between america and russia, though this is far too simplistic and most of those conflicts were about desire for power. but the reason many of those conflicts started was simply about hate. many tribal conflicts began for this reason, too — more than being about control or land, they came from one tribe hating another. this isn’t something historically-irrelevant. twentieth-century wars in croatia, bosnia, cosovo, sudan and congo are only a small sample of war from hate. these people didn’t just want to conquer others — they wanted to exterminate. while it’s never quite that simplistic and the desire for land and control is always present in these situations, it sometimes becomes secondary to a desire to hurt and destroy. this can be seen as analogous to the bully in the playground looking for a fight to cause pain and drive away others. this is the “yuddham” side of war.

the “gavisti” side of war, though, is far more common. it can be thought of as desire, greed or dominance. it can be aggression or belligerence, even colonialism or imperialism. these are all realistically the same thing, though. someone else has something i want so i will take it. i could ask them to give it to me but they won’t because it’s valuable and they want it, too. like a child desiring another’s ice cream, i will punch them until they give it to me. this is what the vast majority of war in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries looks like — a classroom fight over desserts between two children unwilling to share. taking a look at the major wars of the last century or so shows us an obvious pattern…

the first-world-war was about a desire for control, mostly control of europe. who would be powerful? england or germany? would russia regain its respect from the european community or forever be seen as weak after being defeated by a non-european power (japan)? could the ottoman empire take more territory or simply fall apart or would the austro-hungarian empire rise to be the new roman, trans-eurasian power? these were colonial powers fighting for more territory and power. they didn’t want more land in europe, realistically. but they wanted more european power and more land everywhere. actually, they wanted all the land. the war, practically-speaking, was mostly a conflict between the germans and the english with everyone else picking sides. that’s not how it appears it began but that’s what was really going on and that’s certainly how it ended up being divided. this can be thought of as the conflict between the old, established power of england with vast overseas territory against the newcomer, germany, lacking territory but willing to fight to take whatever was possible to gain and make up for lost time.

the second-world-war was partly about payback. but it was mostly about greed — germany wanted land. lots of land. it had a pretty-good reason for wanting it but other people wanted the land, too. and england wanted to have power over germany. america wanted to prove to everyone it could rule the world (mostly russia) — and its gamble succeeded for the sixty years that followed the war and its decision to use japan as a testing ground for the first modern weapons-of-mass-destruction, demonstrating its willingness to fight in ways others were simply incapable of emulating yet. but it really just comes down to different countries wanting to take what other people already had and demonstrating their power. desire, pure-and-simple.

the korean and vietnam wars were about two sides who wanted to control their entire territories. neither side in either case was particularly ethical or good. whichever side won was going to mean a lot of pain and death for everyone involved. but when larger countries decided to use these local conflicts as proxy fights (primarily america, russia and china), the greed involved became far more obvious. it’s unlikely the north koreans were particularly interested in the land in the southern third of the peninsula but the americans were certainly interested in creating a buffer against china and russia. did the vietnamese truly care if their country was communist or profit-seeking? not likely for most of them but the russians and americans were more than happy to pick their favorite sides as a way of trying to acquire more power on the international stage.

of course, some more recent wars are more obviously about greed. iraq invading kuwait or russia annexing territory in crimea aren’t ideological even in the abstract — they are about a desire for more land. america’s threats against china in the last twenty years have little to do with national politics and everything to do with greed for power and the natural resources and trade china represents.

we go to war for the same reasons young children fight. we either hate someone or want something. what we want, unlike the children, is usually either power or land. but what happens on school playgrounds and battlefields is no different except in scale and consequences.

why do wars end? do they ever really?

wars end either because one side decides it’s no longer worth fighting or because one side simply ceases to exist. the end of war is never a compromise or an agreement. that’s just how it’s talked about. it’s always about someone giving up or someone dying.

this, of course, brings up the question of whether wars actually end. practically-speaking, if two sides still exist, the war never really stops. there can be a temporary cessation of conflict and fighting can be postponed. but there are few examples of the animosity ever really disappearing. walk through the streets of europe today and you will quickly discover how much hatred there is between england, france and germany. these three countries haven’t openly been at war in more than seventy years and they still treat each other like enemies — if there was even the slightest excuse for armed conflict, it is doubtful open warfare could be avoided for more than a few months. north and south korea have spent more than sixty years continuing to train armies to fight each other in a war that has been over since before most people on both sides were born but it continues in the minds of both countries as if the fighting only ended yesterday. america and russia have never (truly — never) fought a real war against each other and they treat each other as enemies and have spent the better part of a century massing military forces and aiming missiles and strategic assets at each other without actual fighting breaking out. are america and russia at war? it’s impossible to tell.

looking at the present and future, who is america fighting? well, china, of course. is this a war? there’s no open conflict in the military sense but a trade-war has been ongoing for decades, warships sail through the taiwan straight to intimidate and land is claimed, defended, debated and fought over in international courts and on the internet where voices are raised and open conflict is always a moment away. these countries are actively engaged in cyberwarfare and information-war. their companies fight each other for money. it’s a war mostly based on american greed and desire and they have dragged the rest of the world into the conflict — especially japan, south korea and most of the rest of their asian trading-partners. did the war start? did it end? is it even a war?

there was a time when wars had obvious beginnings and ends. that time ended with napoleon. the first world war didn’t begin in 1914. it started with the russo-japanese war and the rest was just a spillover. it didn’t end in 1919 — it was simply postponed a few years while germany rearmed and everyone took a break from fighting. the second-world-war might have ended in terms of battlefields but conflict just shifted from europe and japan to korea, vietnam, afghanistan and the middle-east where open conflict still rages between the same ideologies and people — only the scale has changed and the type of weapons used.

we pretend wars end because it’s easier to quantify and study them that way. practically-speaking, there has been a single ongoing war since the first few years of the twentieth century with no end in sight, shifting between open conflict and digital (perhaps biological and cultural) battles. it’s unlikely war will ever end. if this one does, it will only be because one side ceases to exist — none of the current factions will ever give in or compromise in the slightest.

how do we determine who was on the right side of a conflict?

there’s a simple answer and a complex answer to this. the simple answer is this — if you fight, you’re wrong. it takes two people to have a fight. if someone attacks you and you fight back, you’re wrong. letting them win might cost you but fighting back will cost you more. always.

the complex answer is similar but a bit more nuanced. it usually comes down to figuring out justification for conflict and inequality. looking at who was being oppressed is a good way to see who was on the better side of a conflict but nobody in war is ever right. just less wrong than the other side in some cases.

the best test for less-wrongness, though, is universal good and equality. if you look at the situation both sides want and ask the question “what would mean something closer to equality for all the people involved?”, it’s likely to give you a sensible way to determine which side is the better potential winner. this side rarely wins, though.

if we look at world-war-two from this perspective, overpopulated germany expanded against financial and territorial oppression from england and france mostly resulting from the defeat in 1919. japan felt threatened by america (legitimately in many ways) and was being pressured by countries from all sides and fought to become a self-sufficient world power. both were, after years of fighting, absolutely crushed by american military power. this is complicated by the fact that germany also attempted to exterminate whole races and japanese military leaders committed horrific war crimes in korea and china. being on the “right” side of a conflict from the perspective of justification doesn’t mean the behavior of those fighting doesn’t descend to the level of less-than-animal-barbarism and human hate is perhaps the only thing other than greed the world has a limitless supply of.

looking at the korean war the same way shows one side fighting for equality and the other for inequality. the problem there is a lot more unresolved and complex, though. the side fighting for equality eventually gained the majority of the land but almost none of the money or international prestige. being supported by america, the south imposed its economic policies of competition and greed (exactly the same as america’s at the time and little changed even today) and gained prosperity while the north has descended into nothing more than postponed-collapse. this teaches us something very important. which side has more ethical merit or justification has nothing to do with who wins a war. and the leaders of the fighting on both sides are rarely anything close to good people — while the motivations and desires of the north were far more virtuous, kim ilsung and his backer, russian dictator stalin, were nothing short of demagogic monsters. judging a conflict by those fighting is difficult while judging its merits from results is destined to fail. the complex answer is almost impossible to determine. we therefore end up simply picking a side in hindsight and sounding silly for defending the actions of criminals and barbarians. it’s better not to talk about wars from the perspective of a good and bad side. if you fight, you’re probably wrong. it’s just a question of degrees after that.

what’s the difference between history and current affairs?

history is what happened yesterday and current affairs is what happens today. these can be looked at the same way. and what happened yesterday is no less history than what happened in ancient egypt or china. we can learn from what happened in either case but sometimes it is far easier to study the more-distant past. that is why studying the last hundred years is often so useful. a century means most of the information is still present and easily-accessible and the lessons are far more clearly useful in a modern context but it gives us enough separation that we can divorce some of our emotional connection to the events of literal yesterday when we are talking about a time of years, usually before our births.

we must take the same approach to history we take to watching or reading the news, though. the same objective-truth-seeking perspective is useful, though there is little that can be known other than basic statistics without there being at least some subjectivity and bias. but, once we have the narrative and have done our best to understand it, we can take that and create some applicable lessons for the future. this is exactly the same whether we are looking at the spanish-flu pandemic or the novel-coronavirus, the revolution in russia or that in iran, the protests in fascist italy and spain or those in the square of heavenly peace. it is important to understand these things as current-events rather than narratives truly separate from our reality. so it’s best to treat the past as present and the present as past — remove emotion and identify bias then try to learn and apply those lessons to the best of our abilities. we won’t always succeed but if we don’t try we’re guaranteed to fail.

what can history tell us about the future?

the future is the result of the past. so we can learn exactly what the future holds for us and determine how we can best deal with it. it’s important to remember, though, that the future isn’t just the result of our actions and decisions in a vacuum. it’s the collective result of everyone’s. what i want and try to make happen is likely not going to come — others seek different things are most of the power in our world comes from the rich and connected.

but history can give us patterns and lessons and we shouldn’t discount them just because they are from a time very different from our own.

history, of course, doesn’t have all the answers. people are human — they are, by definition, unpredictable. but when we look at the past and study history’s narratives, biases and assumptions, we can predict some of that behavior and much of the reaction that will come for each of our choices and decisions. if we study history looking for a perfect model for the future, we will be sadly disappointed. if we go there looking for a better lens to see clearly what to do for the best possible results in the circumstances, we may be pleasantly-surprised.

thoughts

practically speaking, i think i may have just created better summary notes for the first lecture of this course than the originals. but that’s the proof of what i have been talking about. every time you teach something, you understand it better. if you can’t teach it, you simply don’t know it.

this has been a demonstration, of course. do this for your own notes. you don’t have to write thousands of words for every class you attend, though i recommend being as thorough as you can comfortably be. what you will discover is that, having spent a few hours taking the information and turning it into a lesson for someone else, you will be vastly more comfortable with it and it will be retained far better than any in-class exercises, flashcards, group study-sessions or question-and-answer drills will ever give you. and it’s not really going to take you that long. you can probably do this for an hour lecture in little more than an hour or two — and i suspect you’ll probably spend more than that number of hours studying the material in that course during a standard semester, right?

thanks for taking the time to think about this and walk through a sample with me. i hope you’ll find the blogging-and-teaching-to-learn approach as useful as me and my students. good luck with your studies. may you be enlightened and deeply understand the world around you.

[estimated reading time 13 minutes]

there is a brutal pandemic raging across the world and it appears unstoppable. there is a vaccine but people are obstinately refusing to get inoculated despite the side-effects being minimal and it being provided free. no. it’s not another coronavirus. it’s something far worse and this isn’t just a matter of life and death. it’s a matter of our existence as a species. what we are currently experiencing is the pandemic of belief compounded by the curious corollary of respect — in a world where people are so rarely respectful of each other, the reverence for belief systems is frankly staggering and this is contributing to the spread of the disease.

let’s begin with a few basic ideas — thought, opinion, belief, fact, knowledge. these are five words that are often tossed around in everyday speech without really looking at them but it’s important to understand the difference.

a thought is a basic idea. it is something that comes to mind. these often come without any particular purpose or direction but exist there until we do something with them. i think it’s sunny today. i think that’s an apple on the picnic table over there. having a thought is a trigger for more serious development — like forming an opinion or seeking knowledge.

an opinion is something you think. it can be justified or simply random. it’s thought plus direction but without the need for actual information or knowledge. if you have an opinion, it can be something based on experience or what you have learned. it can be biased or nearly-objective. while i have a thought about it being sunny, i have an opinion that sunny days are good. is this justified? well, sunny days encourage plants to grow and make my mind more alert and happy. so perhaps it is. is it knowledge? no. there’s nothing objectively-good about sunny days and rain is also necessary for plants. but my opinion is that sunny days are good. i think it’s an apple on the table but i’m not sure. my opinion, however, is, on reflection, it’s probably actually a pear. why? because it looks a little wider at the bottom. i can’t know. my opinion could be right or wrong — just because it has the potential to be proved one way or the other doesn’t mean it can’t be an opinion. i don’t have to hold my opinions for life. i can walk over and check. then i’ll know. but at the moment i’m just sitting here in the sun, enjoying the warm day and it doesn’t much matter if it’s an apple or a pear because i’m not hungry.

a belief is an opinion that can’t be proved (either true or false). human english-speakers have a curious way of talking about beliefs that imply they are a natural part of existence but they’re actually a consequence of some rather problematic social pressure and indoctrination that’s only existed for a couple of millennia, a short time in the development of human culture and knowledge. instead of saying “i believe this exists”, people often say “i believe in this”. this is just shorthand for an existence belief but it doesn’t feel quite as outrageous to the listener because it’s such a common statement. you will hear people say “i believe in ghosts” or “i believe in gods” meaning “i believe ghosts exist” or “i believe gods exist”. the statement is the same but the underlying sentiment is different — “i believe in…” carries the implication of “…and that’s totally normal so don’t judge me” while a statement of explicit existence tends to come with the idea of self-justification in the face of necessary objections. when someone in the west says “i believe in god”, it has the context of “…don’t you? if you don’t, you’re weird and stupid”, which is a very curious sentiment for anything, especially a declaration of unjustified belief. the important part at the moment, though, is that belief isn’t opinion. this isn’t “i like chocolate” or “dogs are beautiful” — it’s something that must be taken on faith without the possibility of discovering its truth or falseness.

fact is the opposite of belief. it can be positive or negative. it is something that must be proved. yes, in some cases “fact” can be almost-proved, something that is beyond reasonable doubt and potentially modified later. but it’s usually true in a demonstrable way. 1+1=2. gravity exists between two objects pulling them closer together. humans require oxygen for life. these are all facts. it’s important to remember you can’t “believe” a fact — or, for that matter, “believe in” a fact. it simply doesn’t make sense. your belief doesn’t matter to the fact. it exists independently of your awareness of it or acceptance. while it’s important for humans to accept all facts, whether they choose not to is irrelevant to the truth inherent in each. the difference between belief and fact isn’t a matter of degree. they are true opposites. something can be one or the other but never both. a thing can’t be “mostly fact” or “like a belief”. it’s one or the other with no room for overlap or grayness.

knowledge is the next step beyond fact. it is what happens when we accept fact and use it as the foundation for seeking more. the easiest way to think of knowledge is as a collection of facts followed by a series of thoughts — a certain type of thoughts, actually — questions. a simple example looks like this. i am aware humans require oxygen for survival. gravity holds massive objects together (all objects with mass, that is). oxygen at standard earth temperatures is a gas. humans currently live on the surface of earth. does this mean oxygen is held near earth’s surface because it has mass and gravity is keeping it there? well, yes. that’s knowledge. what about other planets? a good question. if there was oxygen being produced in sufficient quantities on mars, for example, through the implementation of vegetation there, the gravity (in combination with many other features) would create an atmosphere on mars much like on earth and humans would be able to breathe near the surface on the “red planet”, too. while we might not personally have proof of every step of that series of questions and answers yet, each statement is either something we certainly can prove or that someone else can prove. none of them are beliefs. they are all facts or potential-facts waiting to become facts or be showed false and become negative-facts. this is knowledge.

there has historically been a pair of developments throughout human existence — the pursuit of knowledge and the escapism and development of beliefs.

in ancient egypt, for example, these two coexisted in society. mathematics and engineering were constantly being developed — just look at the pyramids and the construction of the tombs in the valley of the kings if you haven’t thought of the egyptians as masters of number-processing and structure-creation. at the same time, these astonishing building-projects were invested with mythological silliness and rituals were regularly performed to please non-existent deities in the service of belief systems that developed over the millennia to answer questions whose answers were not yet available.

the greeks of antiquity, a bit later than most of the egyptian progress was made, had a similar dualistic approach to knowledge and belief. there was incredible development in science and philosophy (yes, science was referred to as “natural-philosophy” but it was definitely at least the precursor of physics, chemistry and biology as we know them today) but citizens of athens venerated athena (as an irrelevant aside, one of my closest friends had a beautiful husky puppy named athena so every time i think of the mythological entity i can’t help picturing her as the embodiment of fur barking her commands for the ancient greeks and, while that doesn’t make her any more real, it certainly makes her far more striking in my mind) and made pilgrimages and sacrifices to various, sundry and inexplicable mythological entities believed to be just as real as their neighbors and far more powerful. in a world where so much about daily life was not yet understood, much like in the egyptian case, this was perfectly-comprehensible. before the evolution of scientific method and serious discovery, it was possible to live without belief but deeply dissatisfying because so many questions were left unanswered. the fact that the answers they were given by belief were completely false and intensely misleading didn’t make them less satisfying. as people today are well-aware, that often makes them far easier to accept.

the point is that in ancient times, before about the fourth century of the common era, belief and knowledge were pursued as parallel tracks that weren’t seen as conflicting with each other. all of that changed in three-hundred-and-twenty-five. when the roman mystery cults decided to rebrand themselves using the revolutionary teacher jesus of nazareth as their figurehead and dominate the roman empire with forced-conversion and messianic hyperspirituality, belief and knowledge were placed on an intersecting crash-course with disastrous consequences for those existing at these meeting-points.

at first, there was no contest. the world simply didn’t have much in the way of available knowledge in most of the west. actual fact had been mostly wiped-out as the roman followup to the greek empire collapsed and its scientific, engineering-focused information disintegrated. common people simply didn’t know anything. they couldn’t read or write and existed in insular communities that functioned mostly as echo-chambers of cultural expectation and mythological self-delusion. not only did they not have any knowledge, they had no desire to acquire any. and, as with most undesirable things, it certainly wasn’t going to show-up on its own.

for the first thousand years of what we can think of as the “cult-christianity era”, belief had it all its own way. as with nearly all things, though, thankfully, it couldn’t last. the end of belief’s monopoly rule, though, comes from an odd place in western history — warfare. with the renaissance, the old greed of roman conquest times was finally being let loose again and conflicts like the hundred-years-war required something beyond pure, brutal strength as had been common for a millennium. it required technology for military superiority. and technology demands facts and knowledge, not belief. you can’t believe you’re going to hit a target or forge a better sword. it’s something you have to know. and you have to know it for a reason. with the weapons of war, a revolution in the minds of the masses was being very gradually kindled. then a few great thinkers fanned those flames and got rather badly burned by churches full of candles and hellfire.

from the theoretical inventions of leonardo da vinci to the practical calculations of galileo, the generalized satisfaction with belief as the only answer to questions was now being challenged. it’s not that people were suddenly asking more questions. they were always asking the questions. it’s that they weren’t happy with the answers being “we believe…” — they wanted “we know…” and religious cults and mythology don’t give those kinds of answers even if they use the words to give a sense of truth they can’t possibly emulate. galileo proved (not for the first time but for the first time publicly and blatantly in a while in the west) that the earth was not the center of the universe (or even the solar-system) but that everything visible in the sky, including our tiny planet, orbited the sun. we weren’t special in his eyes and he was right. sadly, this wasn’t a happy place for the church — if earth isn’t special, at the center of everything, why would a deity focus their attentions on it? he was imprisoned and eventually died for his “sins” of fighting against belief in favor of knowledge. he didn’t even demonstrate the rest of the obvious idiocy of belief. only one particular fact. one fact is enough to bring the whole edifice of belief crashing down, though. and those were (and are) some expensive churches and powerful priests.

galileo’s statements weren’t about daily life. they didn’t really have much potential for impact on average people or our place as humans in existence. a few centuries later, though, with the church still holding all the power in the balance between belief and knowledge, a new figure arrived on the scene to issue a challenge — without appearing to be aware of the potential results — to belief as the fundamental way to answer human questions. by the end of the nineteenth century, charles darwin’s discoveries about evolution had shifted the basic belief of humans as distinct from animals and biology as the result of an intelligent plan created by a deity to what we now know is the fact of natural-selection by adaptation over large-scale time. his “theory of evolution” took time to shift from theory to actual proved fact but no time at all to be understood as a massive shift in the fabric of human belief-structures. from then until today (and still ongoing for some curious reason), organized christianity (though, it appears, none of the other religions) decided to wage war on knowledge and face it head-on as the destroying force it obviously was and is. yes, knowledge shows religion to be the useless error it is. i suspect, though, it wouldn’t have made this nearly as obvious if religion hadn’t declared itself willing to fight.

in the modern age, though, this fight is nothing even resembling over. we live in a world completely controlled by technology and scientific progress. our daily lives are governed by the internet and we have meetings in virtual space, talk to each other by typing and share our visual experiences in realtime on social-media. we are obsessed with our technology. science is the foundation of our lives. we rely on modern medicine and transportation every day. there is no aspect of our lives that doesn’t rely completely on the development of logical, scientific fact.

but that hasn’t protected us from the pandemic of belief.

nationalist conservatism has raised its ugly head many times in the past — nazism under hitler, fascism under franco, exceptionalism under truman, free people under berlusconi and populism embodied in the national front and its leadership. it is not a figment of the past and continues to hold court today in much of the west with a seething hatred backing fear of change and desire to live in a belief-focused society. we see this primarily in the united states as depicted by trump, the united kingdom in boris johnson and various other movements throughout the west — canada’s people’s party, brazil’s social christians, australia’s one nation, japan’s ldp and a shocking number of movements in germany, austria and france to name only a few. how are these movements able to exist in a modern world? the answer is surprisingly simple.

humans are refusing to be inoculated against the disease of belief. they embrace it not as a contaminating, deadly virus but like a refreshing drink on a hot afternoon.

what is this inoculation? education. there is only room for one answer to questions. where do humans come from? the simple answer is that we are the evolutionary children of primates, descended from other mammals who can trace our lineages back to fish and, eventually, bacteria. this answer isn’t just true. it’s logical. but there’s an alternative answer. we were created by an intelligent, all-powerful deity. this answer is, of course, not just wrong but unthinkable. but that’s the point. it’s absolutely unthinkable. it avoids thought completely. if you are living a life where thought is not the goal but the enemy, this might be exactly the answer you’re looking for — one that relies only on belief, not knowledge. the important part about this is that there is only one cure for belief — replacing the beliefs with knowledge. once you already have an answer, you don’t go looking in dangerous places (like churches) for belief-based ones.

what we have been doing, though, is allowing these answers to thrive. each belief-based answer is a spore in the transmission of the virus of faith and it contributes to the spread of the pandemic of anti-knowledge. the answer is clear but unpopular, though i am still somewhat uncertain why. we must not respect these beliefs. we must accept things that are true. and accept things that are false. but things that are neither — things that are simply beliefs — must be treated as anathema, undesirable. we must call out these things for what they are — contaminants remaining in our existences from past eras before science had functional answers to these questions. they were wrong then. they’re still wrong now. but it was once preferable to have a wrong answer than no answer at all.

before darwin, for example, there were many potential answers to “where did we come from” but it was impossible to know which was correct. having an answer was comforting. it meant you didn’t have to wonder and continuously ask the question. you felt like you knew something. and that’s what’s happening today all across the western world. people are being spoon-fed (often force-fed) religious answers to questions as if they are scientific truth and they feel they know the answers, despite being no closer to fact than they were in their absences. with the proof of the evolutionary model, however, there was only one acceptable answer that could possibly satisfy — when truth is possible, it is necessary. when truth is not yet possible, any answer is a fantastic temporary port in the storm of daily life.

the problem we are seeing is a generalized expectation of respect for belief and opinion. it tends to manifest as “it’s ok if you believe something because it’s harmless”. we have to stop allowing that cultural error to persist. why is it so important?

the other pandemic gives us a clear demonstration.

in the united kingdom and the united states, bastions of systemic elimination of knowledge from general daily life and its replacement with opinion and belief-based non-facts mostly by organized christianity and conservative politics, infection rates continue to soar despite high vaccination rates. why? respect for belief.

what is the belief people are respecting? you can think of it as many possible things but the easiest way to see it is “personal choice about responsibility”. we know how to prevent the spread of a deadly pathogen — it’s simple. you wear protection. all the time. around everyone outside your home. and this has been proved to work not just for this disease but almost all other airborne contaminants — like the flu where it’s been known for centuries. the belief of “i have a choice whether to wear a mask” or “i don’t want to do that and it’s my life” is inherently flawed. if individual behavior only had individual repercussions, that would be fine. but personal choice leads to society-wide impacts (like a daily infection count in the tens or hundreds of thousands in these two countries). where do those beliefs come from?

ah. that’s where the real danger lies. when knowledge is seen as undesirable and education is understood to be optional and something not necessary for daily life, people don’t get the basic facts about disease transmission. they don’t know how a virus spreads, for example, so they don’t feel any need to take precautions like wearing masks properly and continuously. when they are fed stories about human or national exceptionalism, they translate those into larger meta-belief-systems where they are the centers of their own perceptual universes and others are irrelevant. there is nothing particularly christian or biblical about the idea of “what i want matters and i am the most important person” but, sadly, it’s certainly where the result lands for most conservative christians. i’d love someone to point to the passage in the bible where it tells you to sacrifice your neighbors for your own personal pleasure because i’m fairly certain abraham, moses, david and jesus would have been all for masking-up in the service of public safety.

and this brings us to an interesting point. the problem isn’t religion, really. practically speaking, religious organizations potentially have an incredible role to play in modern society. they could support those without voices. they could help those in need. they could encourage happiness and ethical behavior. they could create community feelings, connectedness and the beauty of interpersonal relationships that have been sadly lacking for the last century as families become more fractured and ethics are destroyed. but they’re not really doing any of these things — at least, most aren’t.

they are focused on antiquated belief systems and conservative social ideas and politics. they’re spending their time thinking about profit and avoiding necessary change when they could be doing what their founders and figureheads instructed them to do — go out and serve those in need and bring peace and comfort to the people. they’re obsessed with belief systems that are no longer necessary when their roles in a modern society are more important than ever. sure, this will require some change in how religions are practiced. a shift from declarations of belief and demonstrations of worship and veneration to social organizations devoted to helping individuals and groups fighting for happiness in and against oppressive and outdated societal structures.

the simple answer is we need to treat belief the way we were taught as children to treat drugs. just say no. don’t stay silent. don’t respect. don’t look at opinion and say it’s ok when it’s not. opinion is often harmless and necessary for life. for example, i like raspberries but not strawberries. my mother is a devoted strawberry aficionado. my father loves sports and i am slightly less interested in watching hockey than staring at dead grass lie on the ground for three hours. there’s no right answer about questions of personal opinion. but belief is different. and we inherently understand that — the question of “is there a god?” is one with an answer. of course not. “where did we come from?” has an answer. after more than a century of elaboration, the simple version is darwin’s evolutionary method. you can’t believe 1+1=3. you don’t get to believe when there is actual fact. respecting those who ignore fact isn’t good manners. it’s teaching a new generation it’s ok to be wrong. to decide to be wrong. to embrace ignorance.

and ignorance, as dr king said, is the path to darkness and hate. let’s not walk there. let’s look at belief and treat it like meth. just say no. may your day be full of discovery. thanks for your eyes.

[estimated reading time 17 minutes]

veneer is a whole different world of woodworking. it feels distantly-related but it avoids so many of the typical parts of working with an organic substance — it moves but its movement is generally irrelevant because we stick it to things that don’t and that solves the problem. and it’s realistically treated like a two-dimensional substance. so it’s not surprising many woodworkers, especially those working by hand, tend to treat veneering like a foreign country unless they’re doing decorative work like marquetry or inlay — even that is often overlooked as a possibility and i’ve rarely seen much from the hobbyist community. veneer has been given a terrible name by the cheap furniture from target and walmart and costco. it’s nothing more than thick cardboard with artificial wood glued to the outside and, yes, that’s veneer. but veneer has a long history.

king tut and the joys of wood-grain

five thousand years ago, the egyptians (well it was either going to be them, the mesopotamians or the chinese, right? did any other civilization actually invent anything? not really…) lacked wood. if you’re curious why, look at a map. egypt is a desert punctuated by a few massive rivers. not much grows there except right next to the rivers. and those are so densely-populated it’s almost all devoted to crop-production, not unexpected as dry-land agriculture was perfected there around the same time. but they still had to build things and wood, precious and scarce, was absolutely vital from an aesthetic and structural perspective. much of the lumber was mediocre. but thin slices of wood were used to veneer the surface from the most prized of trees to build beautiful furniture (and body-holding devices) for the pharaohs — both in life and death. of course, this started with quite rough sawing but moved on from there to thinner and thinner sheets to get more yield from a single tree and artistic forms were quick to develop. interestingly, much like today in much of the western world, their veneers were imported and adhered to locally-grown wood purely for visual effect. while it’s often customary to think of the ancient world as being obsessed with function because they simply had no other choice, this is a clear exception — actually, they were just as obsessed with aesthetics of things then as now but that’s a whole other story. to see just how far the art had come by the time of the new kingdom, browse through photographs from tutankhamen’s tomb and you’ll see the vast majority of his wooden accoutrements were veneered — not just slices but inlaid patterns mixed with precious stones and metals. nothing more complex was really done until several millennia later with chippendale’s extremism.

while the early times of veneer show it was extremely common in practice across the middle east and throughout the persian, greek and roman empires, the decline of civilization at the end of the roman period and the rise of byzantium realistically spelled the end of veneering for about a thousand years, much like with everything else in the west — thought died and the light that showed up in the renaissance is why the period has traditionally been thought of as the “dark ages”, though we now generally don’t use that term because, for some reason, people think the europeans might get insulted if we noticed they were really stupid for a while. honestly, i’d be more worried if they were still acting that way, mired in delusional reactionary conservatism and stuck in mythology against the progress of science and intelligence. you know, like the western world today. so perhaps the real reason we don’t call it the dark ages is that the age was in the middle but the darkness really only receded temporarily as we shifted from using the church as an excuse to using the economy. just a thought. but i digress. we’re supposed to be talking about sticking things together and making art. my bad.

from the beginning of the renaissance, starting mostly in germany, extending its reach more and more as baroque styles were more embraced, veneering was resurrected in the west. this wasn’t a cheap way to build furniture. you weren’t going to see the ancient equivalent of the $5 walmart dining-table in a renaissance-era farmer’s cottage. veneer was only for the rich. it wasn’t just done by hand. it was done by expert, highly-trained hands and it was purely decorative. plywood was a whole other thing but that was, again, something not yet mass-produced. it’s a story like plastic in the modern era — now it’s the cheap alternative but when it first came on the scene it was treated like a newly-discovered precious-metal.

italian and spanish craftspeople developed new techniques for veneering curves and the germans invented and perfected the fretsaw, perfect for cutting intricate patterns we now generally refer to as marquetry. the french and english soon followed these trends and the entire western world was on fire with veneering. (take a look at the louis xiv and xv collections if you’re curious just how decorative this got in this period. it’ll shock you. repeatedly.)

things shifted in the nineteenth century as veneering, along with everything else in the world of production, stopped being a hands-on process and automation was the watchword of the day. brunel’s mechanical veneering machine was quickly followed by faveryear’s veneer slicer, followed only a few decades later by the first production factory opening in germany devoted to the commercial production of veneer. from a technology to gild the already-expensive furniture of the upper-classes to an industrialized option so everyone and their dogs could afford ebony, rosewood and mahogany, the shift was immense and cheaply-finished-dining-tables were just around the corner. along with some of the most expensive decorative furniture ever made — think federal-style furniture, for example.

in the twentieth century, veneer production became completely automated and trees were processed into veneer far more than even regular lumber, mostly to make plywood, a strong material whose perpendicular grain stacks make it stable and eliminate the need to worry about wood-movement. the veneering revolution had come and gone and the beneficiaries were generally the mass-produced-furniture industry and anyone who wanted to build tables in a half hour from sheet goods. but if we look at traditional decorative veneering we will find something beautiful. the ability to do things we couldn’t possibly do with solid wood — either because it moves or because the wood itself is prohibitively-expensive — want an ebony desk? a rosewood cabinet? these, too, can be yours without sacrificing your life-savings if you buy them only a half-millimeter at a time. (ok, some are three times that thick but the really thin ones tend to be the cheapest.) something to remember in this age of an environment we’ve systematically plundered and destroyed, by the way, is that veneer is an extremely stable way to use a tree. it’s not at all unusual to get five-hundred and sometimes a thousand square-meters of veneer from a single tree. compare that to the yield from a log in terms of solid wood and you might start to wonder why the environmentalists haven’t started to protest in favor of veneering.

so that’s the history. let’s talk about how to do it then move on to actually building a simple project with veneer.

let’s grab a slice

there are many ways to get veneer from a board and most of them are industrial — you buy commercial veneer. and this is what i would recommend if you’re starting out in the world of veneering. commercial veneer is usually between .5 and 1.5mm thick and comes in pretty-much every species, color, variant, cut-pattern and grain-style you can imagine. it’s relatively-inexpensive. but you’re a purist and you probably want to make your own. and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. it’s actually surprisingly easy. especially if you have a bandsaw and a thickness-planer. but you don’t need either of them.

first, the powered, simple way to cut veneer. with shop-made veneer, you’re aiming for a final thickness of about 1.5-2mm — definitely no thicker than 2mm and if you can get it closer to 1mm you’re probably going to have better results. why so thin? well, the whole point of veneer is that it doesn’t move. i mean, yes, it’s nice to be decorative and all that. but if it moves when it’s attached to another piece of wood, whatever it is, it’s going to tear itself apart and that’s not good for anyone. at <2mm, the glue is strong enough to restrain the internal movement. thicker than that and you’re really just talking about a wooden panel and movement is the watchword of the day. avoid that.

the powered route

if you have a bandsaw and a planer, this is the simple process. plane both faces of a board so they’re flat and parallel — you know how to do that already as you’re a woodworker (if you don’t, go back to one of the articles about stock-prep but i will assume if you’re setting out to try veneering you’ve mastered the art of making a board flat and level. make a mark on the flat face to indicate which side you’re cutting from (i usually write “planed” but you can choose your own adventure), place the board with its other face against your bandsaw fence and resaw a slice at about 3mm. label the rough face of the resulting piece as “rough” or something that will remind you which face is which. remember to keep the offcut side of the board on the non-fence side of your bandsaw fence or you can get pinching between the fence and the blade, which can be dangerous, damage the piece and break your blade in very short order, often all three at the same time. take the board back to the planer and flatten its newly-rough side, mark it and repeat the resawing process until you’ve cut all your veneers. the last piece from that board already has a smooth face (which you have already marked) so you’re all good. don’t bother to smooth the rough faces now. it’s difficult and far easier at a later stage. just assume we’re going to do that.

the hands-on approach.

slicing veneer by hand is simple. it’s just painfully-slow. it doesn’t matter what you do. even a wide-toothed panel saw is simply not going to get through slice after slice of a board very quickly. if you want to do it, though, the procedure is easy enough. flatten and smooth your board on both sides. stick it in your vise and start cutting a slice off one side about 3mm from the edge and resaw all the way through. make sure you label the faces (smooth, rough). smooth the new rough surface of the board and repeat until you’ve run out of board. same process as the powered route.

getting sticky with it

either way you prepare it, you’ll end up with a stack of veneer smooth and flat on one side, rough on the other. that’s the basic source material for the next step — attaching it. if you’ve skipped the cutting-at-home step, you might have just arrived here with commercial veneer. that’s ok. just remember commercial veneer is already smooth on both sides so you won’t have to smooth it later, just prepare it for finish. otherwise all the same procedure except the “flat” and “smooth” doesn’t matter — you can adhere it with either face and it’ll work.

at this point, you need something to support the veneer — you can call this a panel or a “substrate”. i’ll call it a panel because substrate sounds very much like a government plot to control a population by putting drugs in the water-supply. you’ll hear it called both (and many other things).

so we need to think about what to use. you can attach veneer to just about anything but there are three typical possible choices in woodworking — solid wood, composite materials and veneer-sheet goods. veneering over solid stock is tempting but, unless you’re an expert and you want to have to deal with the wood-movement issue, i would avoid it. there is no upside to using solid stock for veneering. you’re not going to see it and sheet goods feel like wood. with the veneer attached, they look like wood. and veneered solid-wood looks like veneered plywood so nobody will know the difference. composite materials come in various forms — particleboard, cardboard, melamine, phenolic resin panels, mdf. the most common for veneering is the last — mdf, preferably lightweight mdf. if you’re curious what the difference is between lightweight and regular mdf it’s about half the weight, the species of wood used and the density of the adhesive. it’s not quite as strong. it’s strong enough. use the lightweight stuff if you’re going to go the mdf route — if you’ve ever had to move a full sheet of standard mdf, you’ll understand why.

there’s no reason not to use mdf if you’re ok with mdf in general. i have issues with mdf that have nothing to do with veneering. it’s dusty. really dusty. when you work mdf, you won’t be able to breathe unless you use a respirator. and i don’t mean while you’re cutting it. i mean in the shop for hours after. i have severe asthma. i simply refuse to use mdf in my shop for anything. it’s not worth the pain and suffering. there’s nothing wrong with it as a substance if you can put up with this obvious limitation. my suggestion, though, is, if you value your ability to breathe (i often wonder about this given the general public’s disregard for an infectious disease spreading as a pandemic that destroys your lungs and their willingness to accept that risk but that’s another matter entirely), use plywood.

plywood is the natural choice for veneering. why? because that’s how it’s made. plywood is a stack of veneers layered with alternating perpendicular grain directions. it’s extremely-stable and you can treat it like regular wood. plus it’s not dusty like mdf. yes you’ll get sawdust. but no more than with regular solid-wood. here’s another nice thing about plywood rather than mdf, by the way, if it’s never become an issue for you — if you get mdf damp in any way, it will completely disintegrate and start to grow mold. this is not generally a good selling-factor. my generalized loathing for composite fiber panels is rather extreme. just so you know.

some people will tell you veneering over plywood means you have to continue the pattern of perpendicular grain. while that may be the best practice, it’s not necessary. so you should do it if you can but if you can’t it doesn’t matter. treat it like grainless mdf and it’ll be totally ok.

so we have our panel. now how are we going to get the veneer to stick to it?

there are two ways to get things to stay in place — traditional clamping pressure or hydraulics. the second is generally the one that’s recommended if you’re going to do a bunch of it. it’s far simpler and tends to work very well. you can use a veneer-press (which is about the cost of a small village) or a vacuum-bag (which you can pick up at your local supplier for a couple of hundred dollars — or much more, depending on how large and powerful you want the bag and pump to be) to apply even pressure on a piece, often both faces at once. if you’re going to use that approach, once you get the glue on, don’t just put the piece in the vacuum-bag and apply pressure. it will warp. put a sheet of plywood over the veneered surface(s) then deposit the whole thing in the vacuum-bag and increase the pressure. you’ll get a much flatter result that way.

with clamps, though, the procedure is a lot more involved. not complicated. just more involved. you’ll need clamping-cauls. to veneer a tabletop, for example, you’ll probably need a clamp on each side every 10cm or so pressing down on a thick piece of wood spanning the entire width of the table. this requires a lot of clamps — and a lot of strips of wood —, especially if it’s a big table. a 1x2m table will require, at 10cm-spacing, 42 clamps and 21 cauls. if you can’t picture this, i’d say draw a picture and label the clamps. you’ve probably got it right in your head, though. this is a perfectly-acceptable way of clamping veneer and it will absolutely work. if you have to do this on a regular basis, though, you’ll quickly decide to get a vacuum-bag system to avoid the effort. it may also be cheaper than paying for all those clamps. you really do need a lot of pressure to avoid delamination in the future.

we’ve covered most of it but there’s one more sticky elephant in the room and it’s mostly yellow. what adhesive do you use?

let’s begin with what adhesive you shouldn’t use. contact-cement. just don’t. there are many reasons this is a bad idea and none that make it a good one. it’s hard to work with and it generally fails. don’t believe me? call a commercial cabinet shop that’s been in business for a while. ask them what the biggest problem they have with custom-made kitchen countertops adhered with contact-cement is. i promise it’ll be “they delaminate” — and their contact-cement is far, far more industrial than what you’re getting at walmart. it’s asking for trouble. do it at your own risk. no. on second thought, just don’t do it.

that leaves us with a few other options. you can use urethane glue or epoxy. they’ll definitely work. urethane glue, though, is very messy and comparatively-expensive. epoxy is even more expensive, though significantly less messy. it is, however, generally very slow. that being said, these options will both work. i should probably mention one other possible problem with these two, though, if you’re using a vacuum-bag system. water-based glues like pva will easily peel off the plastic on the inside. urethane glue is much, much more difficult to remove and the bag can be damaged beyond repair. trying to get epoxy off the inside of the bag is an exercise in frustration i wouldn’t recommend to anyone. so you will have great results if you use either of these adhesives. you just might not find the tradeoff worth it.

that leaves us with the obvious choice — wood-glue. as with most things in woodworking, yellow pva is usually the best tool for the job. it’s not the strongest but it’s stronger than you need it to be, easy to use and easy to clean-up. and that becomes more and more important as you get older, i guarantee. i’m not even that old and the fluffy residue from urethane glue drives me beyond crazy every time. it’s not that the glue doesn’t work. it’s that there’s going to be squeezeout and it’s going to be a nightmare. even a little is annoying.

for veneering, you can definitely use titebond 1 or 3. take your pick. i avoid titebond 2 in general, not specifically in veneering applications, because has a history (i’ve experienced it too many times) of color-leeching and visible pigment change. you might not have this problem. if you work only with oak and beech, you probably won’t. if you work with cherry and walnut, you likely already know what i’m talking about. the advantage of titebond 1 is that it dries faster and is cheaper. titebond 3 is water-resistant and gives a stronger bond. both work fine. you can certainly use other brands — check out james wright’s glue tests if you haven’t seen them yet — they’re awesome af. they have nothing to do with veneer but they will tell you a lot about glues. mainly that you can use whichever pva you have easy, inexpensive access to and it’ll be totally fine.

one last thing about the procedure. once you have your veneer attached to the board, this is the best time to surface it. if you’re doing it with powertools, run the panel through the planer and make sure the veneer is <2mm thick. if you’re doing it with handtools, do the same thing with your handplane(s) and the result will be the same. you’re going to have to smooth and sand it after the powered planer, anyway, right? if you’ve used commercial veneer, this should just be a question of light sanding but i suspect you’ve jumped in the deep-end and made the veneer from scratch, too. congrats.

time under pressure

let’s do a relatively-simple veneer project to get you started and dispel any worries about the procedure being impossible. you’ll only need a very basic set of tools for this. to cut the veneer, you need a veneer-saw or a very sharp knife. i like using a veneer-saw and they’re quite cheap. but these pieces are all linear so there’s no need for a fretsaw or any specialized gear for your bench. you can just cut the pieces using a metal ruler as a straight-edge or a paring block. anything that’s at least as long as the cut you’re making.

when you make these cuts, clamp the piece down. don’t assume your weight will keep it from moving. precision is important.

today’s project is a modern square clock. you can certainly make it round if you prefer but that involves all kinds of curves and i don’t think it’s necessary — the square one is quite striking already! you’ll need a cheap quartz movement and you can pick one of those up at a hobbyist’s store or on amazon or wherever you usually get your clock stuff.

this is what it should look like when we’re done…

as you can see, this is a sunburst-pattern veneer with some decorative dark pieces. you’ll need two different types of veneer to make this work — or a little ingenuity with some ink, which is what i did the first time i made this. the clock is 400mm square. so what you need is a board 400x400mm. i suggest 19/20mm plywood. use whatever tools you like to get a square. if you use good-quality plywood, you’re more likely to get it to be flat. high-quality plywood in most of the west is often referred to as “baltic-birch”, though it may go by another name in your area. that stuff works well. a very small piece shouldn’t cost much wherever you get it. you might already have a large-enough offcut in your shop.

now comes the fun part. we need to cover five faces in veneer. no, you don’t need to cover the back. why? because we’re using plywood and it’s already covered on the back. you need to finish it but veneering the back is only necessary if there’s going to be a difference in moisture-absorption-levels. and that isn’t really an issue on a small panel that’s already made from veneers. we need seven small trim pieces for the front, four edge pieces and twelve circle segments to put the clock together.

the edge pieces are the easiest to cut so let’s start with those. they’ll be the thickness of your panel wide (likely 19mm) by 400mm. they’ll all be the same. every panel should be cut too large and trimmed later, other than the inside-frame components. aim for approximately 24×410 on these. place your straight-edge on the grain of your veneer, slice with your veneer-saw or knife repeatedly until it separates cleanly. then repeat until you have four surfaces the right size.

the outside and inside frame pieces are the next ones we’ll cut. the top and bottom frame pieces are 10x400mm. the side pieces are 10x380mm (missing the 10mm on top and bottom). the center division pieces are a little smaller. the horizontal piece is 10x380mm) just like the sides. the upper and lower vertical pieces are 10x185mm. they’re all rectilinear so they can all be cut with a single straight-edge.

for the radial pieces, you have two choices. you can either cut a block of wood with a 30-degree angle on one end to use as a template or you can cut them all using an angled straight-edge. either is fine. each piece has a 30-degree angle and the other end will be trimmed to fit later. what i would suggest is cutting them all at 60x150mm and trimming them once they’re on the panel using your straight-edge.

align the 30-degree point so it is directly inline with the grain of your veneer and draw the two outside lines 150mm long then connect their ends and you have a 30-degree wedge. make twelve of these.

you now have all the pieces. from here, it’s just a matter of attaching them in a sensible pattern and trimming them to fit. start with the outside edges. glue those on and clamp them in place. they shouldn’t take long to dry. once dry, remove the clamps and use a chisel or plane to flush the edges with the panel. you’re already getting the hang of this veneering thing.

a note about gluing to plywood endgrain. it’s a good idea to size the endgrain first. this is not a structural joint. it’s just veneer so there’s no pressure to withstand. still, apply the pva to the sides of the panel and let it dry then sand flush. now adhere your edge-banding and all will be good with the world. instead of gluing to the endgrain, you’re gluing mostly to the glue. it’s a much easier bond to make work.

now stick your center dividers on. be careful about measurement. you will probably want to hold each one in place until the glue starts to set. double-check they’re centered. once they’re dry, you won’t be able to move them and they’ll look odd if there’s any variation. the human eye is an amazing tool for finding the middle of a square. these can be quickly clamped in place and it’s just a matter of waiting for them to dry.

people will tell you a lot about taping pieces in place. you’re welcome to do it for the radial pieces if you like. i’d use masking-tape or veneer-tape. don’t use painter’s-tape because it’s simply too strong and can damage the veneer if you have to pull hard to get it off. if you use a vacuum-bag, it’ll make it particularly difficult and might leave an indentation in the veneer, too.

the important part, though, is that you align the points. each piece has a precise 30-degree angle – you triple-checked this when you were cutting, right? either with the template or your angle-guide. given that each edge is exactly 90-degrees, three of them should fit exactly. they will significantly overhang the edge but that’s ok. we’re going to solve that problem right now. stick all twelve pieces in place. now lay your edge pieces where they will go and make a mark where they intersect. you could have cut these exactly the right size before but it’s far easier to do it accurately with the pieces you’ve actually made. the important part is to get four straight edges. exactly 10mm of edge isn’t significant. it just has to be straight. and cutting these pieces independently, hoping they will come out straight when assembled is a lot more difficult than just cutting them too big and trimming them later. you can hold them down with double-stick tape while you mark them or you can tape them in place. it doesn’t matter which you choose. just make sure they’re firmly in place and draw your lines. then take the whole thing apart and trim the pieces. then glue them and clamp them in place. i’d suggest using the clamping cauls we discussed earlier to make sure there’s pressure across the whole face.

the last step is to put on the face’s four outside-edge pieces these should be easy at this point and won’t even need cauls because the clamps can be put along their entire lengths. you can use cauls if you are low on clamps. stick those in place. when they’re dry, trim the overhang.

if you’ve been using shop-made veneers, this is the point where you will need to seriously smooth the whole thing. if you’re using commercial ones, you can skip to finish-sanding. the piece is now done and ready for finish.

apply the finish of your choice. i’d recommend six to ten coats of thin clear-dewaxed-shellac.

whether you’ve made the clock with me today or just discovered a little more about veneering and put the decorative timepiece on your todo list, i hope you’ve become a little more confident about using veneer in your usual work. it’s a great skill to develop and incredibly useful for building furniture, though we often neglect it as traditional woodworkers. thanks for taking the time to explore the topic with me!

[estimated reading time 10 minutes]

let’s build a small western-style toolchest. there are many ways to do this and most of them involve complex joinery – usually dovetails and mortise-and-tenons. or metal fasteners. this one is very traditional-looking and doesn’t use any of those. it’s held together with long dowels and can be made completely from solid-wood or use a few pieces of plywood to save on cost and simplify a few of the components – up to you at each stage.

before we get going, there is a set of diagrams that accompanies these step-by-step instructions. if you click here, you can download them and they’re completely free. all i ask is that, if you share them, you don’t just send the file but link these instructions, too. yes, someone can build the project from only the diagrams but why bother to try to figure it all out when you don’t have to? i don’t mind making this stuff completely free for my students and anyone else taking the time to read. i’m a teacher, after all. i make my living teaching, not making woodworking plans. that’s not to say nobody should sell plans. just that i don’t. yes, i might be able to make a few bucks. but it would be a few bucks and it’s truly not worth that to me to keep them from anyone who might want to use them and doesn’t have the money to invest. of course, if you really want to send me money, you’re more than welcome to pass along a few dollars. but it’s certainly not necessary and you can take these instructions and plans, along with all my others, and use them freely – most of the reason i do that is because i have been asked by other teachers if they can use my plans in their classes and, of course, i think that’s a great idea. we have so many people teaching woodworking now who don’t have the design background and skills, only the desire to impart basic construction knowledge. and i want to make it as easy for them to do it as possible.

in terms of materials, let’s talk about metal. you’ll need two strap-hinges with an offset as thick as the back piece. if you use my dimensions, this is 20mm thick so they need to be 20mm-offset strap hinges. i recommend a hinge-length of about 200mm and a width about 50mm but you can use whatever is available. you’ll also want some sort of a closing fastener. i’ve showed it here with a locking hasp but you can use anything you like. if you use one of these, you’ll need to carve a little recess (mortise) in the top to house it and attach the other component to the front. measure carefully. i’m not going to prescribe specific hardware. use your judgment. i’m sure it’ll be great whatever you use. if you don’t want to lock it, you can ignore that completely and stick to hinges. i like the look of a traditional folding-hasp close and the brass is beautiful so that’s what i use. it’s not necessary. you can get a gate-fastener at your hardware store for five bucks and it’ll work fine.

now we need to think about wood. try not to think too hard about it. you can make this from whatever wood you like. i can think of some that would be truly awful for it – white pine is simply too soft for most construction needs unless you’re framing a building because when it’s thin it bends and has little strength along its length. but most things are totally fine. if you’re on a serious budget, something like spruce or southern-yellow-pine would be ok. if you want it to look nice, you can use cherry, walnut, oak or, my personal favorite, hard-maple. it’s a toolchest. there are no rules about this.

the other thing about wood selection is that you probably want to decide what you’re going to finish it with. i think you should use shellac. why? because i think that’s pretty-much what all projects should be finished with. it’s cheap, fast, beautiful and easy. but you can finish it with anything. if you want it to have more color, use milk-paint. if you’re going to milk-paint it, that might mean you can use a cheaper wood because you’re not going to see it – even if you don’t like the look of poplar (which i honestly don’t mind that much but it’s definitely not my fav), you can use it under milk-paint and it’s far cheaper than cherry in most places. the other option is dye. if you want it to be a beautiful almost-black color with some grain showing through, pick any wood species you like then dye the pieces with sumi/india/asian-calligraphy ink. a caution about dye, though. it doesn’t protect the wood. once it’s dyed and dried (i know, i’m a poet and definitely realized after my first few books got published) you still need a protective finish on the wood. again i say shellac. but you can use something else if you like – polyurethane works as does varnish. but i strongly believe nobody has that kind of time and shouldn’t have to put up with the awful smell.

one more note on finishing. when should you finish? contrary to the obvious answer, don’t finish at the end. finish before you assemble the parts. first, prepare things so they’re flat and smooth and cut your joinery. then sand them. then finish. now assemble. the easiest way to finish an inside corner? before it’s inside anything or a corner. how do you keep the finish out of the holes and grooves? tape works. or you can ignore it and just stick your drill/chisel back in there to clean it after. i suggest tape. it’s hard to get finish off and glue to stick later. but it’s not my chest (i’m told that’s what she said) and you’re welcome to do anything you like. you can fill dowel-holes with cotton balls, by the way. i’ve also seen people use earplugs. i just tape over them completely. the area around the mouth of the dowel-holes isn’t going to be seen so it doesn’t need to be finished. just put a strip of painter’s-tape along the entire part that’s going to be covered by the mating board and you can save yourself all the trouble of filling the holes.

a final thought on materials. the panels of the top, bottom and tray-bottoms can be either solid-wood or plywood. the design will work with either. if they’re solid, you have to make sure you only glue them in the centers to allow for expansion and contraction of the panels with the changing seasons. if they’re plywood, glue them in the grooves and move on with your life. again, up to you. there’s no reason to worry about it either way. the same dimensions and procedures work regardless of which direction you decide to walk in.

as for finishing, on outside parts you’ll want to break the edges with a block-plane. these edges, if you’ve done your job well, will be sharp. soft hands will touch them. just remember to do this at the end. that’s not really part of the construction process. you should do it just before you apply finish. it doesn’t have to be round. just a few passes with a plane will leave the edges visually-sharp and precise without cutting your children’s fingers when they explore. or yours. cause nobody likes bleeding fingers.

with all that out of the way, i think you’ll find this box surprisingly simple to build. let’s begin with making wide boards. you can certainly use a very wide piece of wood to get the sides, front and back from. the board will need to have a nominal-yield at least 400mm wide. as that’s not generally a cheap or easily-sourced thing, i’m assuming you’re going to glue two boards together to make this and that gives a nice decorative touch to it with a thin dividing line in the grain at the halfway point, anyway. if you want an even-more-obvious break, you can add a light chamfer to the mating-edges on the outside of each face to accentuate the dividing line as a design feature. i think it’s fine just to have it even all the way around the box. it shows precision and deliberate choice rather than simply making panels and not caring where the divisions go around corners.

so the first step is to cut these to approximate length. you should leave them a little long and thick when gluing up because you’ll need to smooth and trim later if things aren’t completely-accurate. which they might not be. you want a front and a back panel that are made from two 860x200mm boards and two sides with two 380x200mm boards each. these pieces are all 20mm thick. i’m assuming unless i say specifically (which i won’t) the grain will be running in the long direction on these boards.

before you glue them together, take a look at the diagrams and see where the grooves will be cut. it’s easier to cut the stopped-grooves on the front and back panels before you glue them together. so do that. you can cut the long grooves on the front, back and sides before or after glueup – the timing doesn’t matter for those because they don’t change in difficulty. the rails that will sit against the side panels can be glued together at this point or later. it doesn’t really matter. i’d do it now while the glue and clamps are out but as long as you get them done before they have to be inserted it’s all fine.

at this point, you need to decide whether you want to make your bottom panel from plywood or solid stock. if you need solid stock, glue your panel the same way as the other components. if plywood, cut out the piece. it should be 840x200mm. i’ve showed it here as 20mm thick (like 20mm plywood) but you will need to adjust your grooves to match the material you have. remember, don’t worry about being accurate to the plans if your materials vary. always make things fit reality, not theory.

with your panels glued together, now you can assemble the bottom. you’ll need to drill the holes for the dowels. i’ve given specific placing instructions for them but realistically the point is to drill the holes in the centers of the side edges and make sure they match in the vertical direction. you can do this with a ruler or a combination-square. you can do this by drilling one set then marking the second to match. as long as they’re not too close to the ends or edges or grooves, they’ll never be seen. the depths are approximate but they’ll be good guidelines to make strong joints. don’t add lots of extra dowels. doubling the number of dowels doesn’t add strength. you’re just weakening the sides. this is plenty of dowels already.

my recommendation is this – glue the thing together as two capital-l-shaped assemblies then slide in the bottom and box-rails and glue the last two mating-faces. you can definitely do it all-at-once. but there’s no need to put that much pressure on yourself. just glue and check it’s square and it will all come together fine. if you’re using plywood, glue the bottom panel in. if you’re not using plywood, glue it only at the center of the ends and put no glue along the sides. make sure you leave enough space in those grooves for the panel to expand and contract. with plywood, you can make it tight. with solid wood, you need to pay attention. if you’re making this in the winter, you might need a couple of extra millimeters. at the height of summer, you can probably make it fit tightly and it’ll be ok. wood expands and contracts across its grain and not noticeable along its grain. this bottom will expand in the 400mm direction, not the 840mm direction. the base as a whole will expand and contract vertically and all the pieces are moving the same amount in the same direction so you don’t need to worry about it at all.

now you can move on to making the top – probably while the glue dries on the bottom. the top is even easier. it’s frame-and-panel like the bottom but it’s a single-layer frame. cut the four pieces, make your grooves, drill your dowel-holes and slide it all together. if you use plywood for the panel, you can glue it in – this makes the whole thing significantly stronger. plywood here really is the best material and you won’t see the edges. it really will look the same as a solid panel except you’ll get extra strength. if you want to use solid-wood, though, you have to be careful in the same way as with the bottom. leave yourself enough room for expansion and contraction depending on what season you’re making this in. you can glue it in the center of the short edges but nowhere else. with that done, slide it all together with glue and stick it in the clamps.

you’ve now made the chest. let’s make the sliding trays that go in it. these are made exactly the same as the base of the chest but you don’t need to glue panels together to make it happen or cut extra grooves for rails. prepare your four sides, cut your grooves, drill your holes for dowels and put the whole thing together. yes, you’ll need to allow space for expansion and contraction of the bottoms in their grooves if you are using solid-wood but plywood works just as well here as in the other components. up to you. if plywood, glue the bottoms in their grooves. if solid-wood, glue them in the middles of the short edges and nowhere else.

how do the trays work? the bottom one is slightly narrower. it fits in the lower rail’s cavity. the top slides on top in the wider space left at the top of the rail. they shouldn’t prevent each other from sliding but they should touch each other. and the top tray should touch the lid when it closes. they should run firmly against the sides. a tight fit can be a beautiful thing. if it’s loose, it will rack. if it’s too short, it will rattle when you move the chest. if they don’t move smoothly enough, wax the sides. they should slide easily but not move out of place too much when the chest is shifted. no, it’s not a portable toolbox. it’s too big and heavy for that. but it’s not going to stay in a single place its whole life so it’s useful to remember it’s not a piece of stationary furniture.

now you can attach your hardware with screws. don’t forget to predrill. this isn’t driving deck screws outdoors through construction lumber. these are thin pieces and they’ll split. it’s worth the few seconds. you’ve put in a lot of work already and it would be a shame to destroy it by trying to take shortcuts, don’t you think?

you’re done. if you’ve taken my advice on finishing, you’ve already sanded and finished before you put it together with glue. if you didn’t, you have some finishing to do. either way, you’re finished with the construction process and you’ve very quickly and easily built yourself a beautiful little toolchest that will last you years. you should be proud of yourself. thanks for following along here.

if you missed it earlier, here’s a link to the printable diagrams with measurements.

[estimated reading time 8 minutes]

humans are extremists. it’s not a subsection of the population. it’s everyone. we just tend to apply it to different things but we wouldn’t need revolutionary teachings like the buddha’s “middle-way” or jesus talking about a life of self-abandoned public-service if we were naturally more balanced. we’re not. and this is a problem in so many spheres of life — we tend to either eat too little or gorge ourselves, drive so slowly we drive everyone crazy or get speeding tickets, spend a month sober or wake up the next morning wondering exactly when we lost count of the shots the night before. of course, as we get older we often learn to be more moderate. but that doesn’t mean the automatic-impulse to be extreme disappears. we just change it to new focuses. foci. i know. we’ll go with focuses because it doesn’t sound like someone having sex with your optic nerves.

some tend to become extreme instead of in their drinking and eating in their politics. from moderate desires to reactive conservatism. others become more extreme in their hobbies — every moment is about collecting model cars or building the best possible set of tarot decks. but i believe the most common is actually an extremism in consumption, not of food but everyday goods, especially clothing and furniture. and as someone who loves making these things — especially furniture but, fun fact, i have actually done quite a bit of the other thing and even taught sewing and embroidery at a high school — i worry we may be collectively missing the boat on what’s important.

i’m going to talk about this in terms of furniture as examples but the same goes for all objects we possess in the modern world — clothing, jewelry, cars, even houses. it doesn’t really apply to luxury goods but here’s my basic belief about luxury goods — if you own them, you’re a bad person and a huge portion of the problem with modern society because you’ve used your money for self-indulgence instead of helping others. no, it doesn’t matter if you donate to charity. you’ve still spent money indulging yourself in ways that were unnecessary when that money could also have been used to help those in need and you should be ashamed of yourself. you have no excuse. with that out of the way, let’s continue.

if this has offended you, it’s only because you already know you’ve acted shamefully by not doing everything you could to save starving children or displaced migrants, buying a fancy new car instead when you could easily have had exactly the same benefit from something else and had thousands left to serve. what would jesus think of this self-indulgence? i doubt he’d have approved.

let’s get back to the issue at-hand, though. the idea of “perfection-or-shit”. i’ll give you an example. you like tea (who doesn’t?) but your kettle has died. you need a new kettle so you go to the store. you think of this process as having two simple options — do you need a cheap kettle (ten bucks?) or do you want something that’s seriously a quality piece of engineering? two extremes. and that’s what’s out there — there’s very little in the middle. either you’re getting a kettle that’s made of plastic and smells like the inside of a chemical factory (what does your tea taste like, dude?) or something from brushed stainless steel and glass beyond the hundred-dollar mark in most cases. there’s very little we can do about this dichotomy in the marketplace. but you can see where this dualistic extremism is coming from. you’re either cheap af or you’re a longterm investor. people tend to fall in one category or the other.

that’s already a problem. but when making things this can be completely self-destructive. and you need to avoid that if you’re ever going to get things done you can be happy with.

so you want to build a table. i know i use tables a lot as examples. they just make such great examples and everyone needs a couple of tables in their general living experiences. we eat on tables and work on tables and sometimes even dance on tables. if you haven’t danced on a table, you really should try it sometime. but if you fall it’s not on me. you just picked the wrong table. there are two types of woodworkers and there’s a serious issue with both approaches.

the weekend-warrior-type woodworker goes to the shop, ignores the design stage, grabs some framing lumber and screws the whole thing together in a couple of hours. then it’s sanded, painted and shoved in the kitchen as a complete thing. it just feels and looks like a big pile of “tableness”. and that’s certainly one way to do it — it’s functional. but it’s not very satisfying. and those projects tend to feel lacking — and fall apart. if you’re putting something together with mechanical fasteners and it’s going to be used every day (like a dining-table, for example), there’s a very good possibility they’re going to become looser and looser over time and you’re going to end up some day in a few years discovering just how hard it is to get your breakfast off the floor because the whole thing has collapsed. but, of course, much like ikea or walmart furniture, it’s built to be temporary. and that’s the point.

the other extreme is what i call the compulsive-heirloom-builder. every project must be perfect. even the first one. a thousand hours of youtube before cutting the first set of dovetail joints and hundreds of dollars of wood for the most basic project because it will be passed down through generations. bespoke finishing and complex joinery on absolutely everything. even the parts you’ll never see. these are usually the people who refuse to use plywood on drawer-bottoms because it’s “not traditional” or “what will future generations think?” — seriously, future generations won’t think anything because your furniture probably won’t last that long. no, not because it falls apart. just because nobody’s going to keep it six generations from now to the point it’s ending up in a museum. most of the time, furniture is damaged long before it gets to that point because, for example, someone is dancing on it. or it simply gets moved one too many times and the legs crack off. most furniture that’s well-built is destroyed beyond the point where it’s worth repairing long before it actually wears out or falls apart on its own. we live in a perpetually-nomadic, adaptive world. it’s not like it was five hundred years ago (or even two) where people lived in the same place for generations and kept the same things in their homes. stuff moves. and moving stuff breaks it.

so we need a middle-way approach to building furniture (and everything else you’re making, whether you’re a tailor or weaver or just down with the construction of candlesticks — and if your table has gone out to sea with its nursery-rhyme, that shit’s as good as firewood already, i suspect). i call this approach the “leviticus furniture challenge” — because that’s not just great for seo but sounds like a competition to build shit that’s going to go on the international-space-station. it’s not, though. if you know your religious history, leviticus is the origin of the number seventy being used as the “middle-ground-expectation” for many things. how many years should you expect to live? seventy. how much cattle should you sacrifice? seventy. (i know, i know, don’t sacrifice any cattle — there’s an app for that now and i believe we call this a mental disorder, “bovine-pyromania”, don’t we?) how many days do you need to wait? well, seventy, of course. cause that’s enough for anyone. yes, jesus took the thing a little more in that direction when he started talking about seven seventies and such but this is as far as the analogy needs to be dragged — at this point we’re not just kicking a dead horse but starting to worry about doing damage to its hooves from repetitive-stress.

what does a middle-way look like in the “lfc” model? aim for seventy years. this isn’t a science. it’s a practical series of questions and answers. assume you want everything you build to last seventy years. you’ll probably be dead then and your kids will either like it or won’t but you won’t be too worried about the table. twenty years and you’re going to be annoyed to see it go. two hundred years and there’s almost no chance anyone’s given enough of a shit to keep that thing around this long — great-grandma made that thing? who the fuck remembers? pass the kerosine, will you? … it sounds sacrilegious but we really should be realistic about these things.

if you want it to last seventy years, that means several things.

1. you have to plan, design, prototype and pay attention when you build.
2. if there are mistakes, you should try to repair and minimize but there’s no need to obsess about them because the piece is eventually going to be replaced.
3. there’s no need to describe your failures to others because, despite being designed to be beautiful, it is still overall a functional piece — don’t tell people you cut gappy dovetails if they didn’t notice!
4. you can buy good-quality raw materials but there’s no need to go to extremes. pine is almost-never a good wood for furniture. you don’t need ebony drawer-fronts. cherry is a happy place. walnut is a source of great enjoyment. you can join the knights of the white oak and raise a glass of maple syrup to your balanced bank-account.
5. when you cut joinery, make sure it’s solid but there’s no need for it to be decorative — your mortise floors don’t have to be accurate because nobody will see them but you should take time cutting the shoulders because everyone’s notice those — work smarter not harder, as my grandfather often said when i was obsessing over meaningless details while ignoring the important ones.
6. stop thinking about reversible glues. nobody’s going to take apart and reassemble your joints. they’re just not. and pva can be separated with heat and moisture, anyway. but if you’re using epoxy it’s really still ok. if the furniture breaks, there’s a 99% chance it’s going to end up in the firewood pile or on the side of the road as scraps — remember, seventy years is a good life for a table and resurrection is even less likely in the land of woodworking than in the afterlife.
7. sand your surfaces. stop obsessing about “this was kissed with a handplane”. nobody cares. if that’s what you want, that’s totally fine. but like plywood-construction where it makes sense to avoid the effort and pain of wood-movement (like a cabinet-back or a drawer-bottom) it’s an unnecessary concern. being able to get a finished surface straight off the plane doesn’t make you a better person. using sandpaper doesn’t make you a bad craftsperson. they’re both totally valid approaches and there needs to stop being pressure. remember, nobody’s looking at your piece in a museum judging you. do what gets the result and don’t take the time to think about what will make you look skillful to future generations. as with your views on popular music and marijuana use, future generations are unlikely to give enough of a shit to listen.

of course, seventy is an approximate goal. no, not everything you or i make will last that long. some will actually last generations — if you make a stool, for example, there’s every chance it could have a life of hundreds of years moving from kitchen to kitchen and toddler to toddler. a big table is likely to be the wrong size in the next house and be disposed of, eventually being too damaged to worry about, likely far sooner than seventy years. but the point of the exercise is to stop focusing on furniture with an afterlife or, on the other side of the spectrum, furniture without a real life at all, only a childhood.

this isn’t an instruction-guide or a revolutionary philosophy. i mean, we have enough of those from the buddha, jesus, guru nanak and master kung. among others. nobody was left off that list out of disrespect. just saying. (yes, i get comments like that.) just next time you make something — whether it’s furniture or clothes or fabric or dolls or whatever floats your metaphysical sailing device — think about it in a realistic timeframe. it won’t be an heirloom. it shouldn’t be disposable. it should have a good, full life then go the way of the elderly elephant — fading off into the sunset in a blaze of memory and tusk joy. thanks for exploring this with me. your shop is calling you. go make something. make it good. good enough to last. enjoy!

[estimated reading time 6 minutes]

it’s fall. there are campfires in the air and leaves make it so difficult to walk without falling i’ve mostly taken to getting my exercise in the middle of the street. the season of foreboding is here — in the northern hemisphere, it’s about to get so cold those who possess external reproductive parts will suddenly find them solidified by temperature when they venture outside and we will all truly begin to debate the potential wisdom of migration to morocco. personally, i’m all for it, though my spoken arabic is less than perfect, despite all my attempts to improve — it’s just got so much gender in it. but i digress. it’s definitely fall. so i think it’s the perfect time to talk about spring joints.

if you know what a spring joint is, that’s great. but explaining it to someone who’s never seen it done before can be a little confusing. so let’s take a scenario. you want to build a table and the top is wide. you aren’t likely to find a single board that wide so you have to glue two thinner boards together, edge-to-edge. the standard procedure is to take those boards, joint and flatten an edge on each then apply glue and an absolute multitude of clamps to try to get uniform pressure along the entire length of the board — remember, this is a tabletop we’re talking about so it could easily be a couple of meters long or more and the glue-joint spans the whole length. this can be cumbersome and imperfect. with modern pva, you need serious clamping-pressure to get a good joint. yes, you can definitely use epoxy but that’s expensive, messy to clean-up and takes so long to dry by the time you’ve got the table finished you might as well reuse the boards for a coffin. there has to be another way.

well, there is. perhaps not better but definitely more convenient. and it solves two potential problems. one is that this joint must absolutely be flat and true or any gaps will simply cause the table to split as the seasons change. the boards will pull away from each other unevenly if there is even the thickness of a piece of paper so you have to be accurate with your handplane or you’re … screwed. and not in a nice, get-out-the-drill sort of way.

the other is that you need more clamps than you can possibly own. often very large ones. so you end up going down to the hardware store and spending a wedding’s worth of investment on clamps you’re only going to use three times in your life unless you actually build tables for a living. or you get cheap pipe-clamps and end up torquing the table out of flat and it takes you nineteen-thousand days with a plane to get it surfaced after it’s glued.

the answer is the spring joint. imagine your two boards sitting on-edge clamped to your bench — however you clamp them. i do it between a dog in my end-vise and a dog on the bench and this is how i suggest doing it but you can do it any way you like. heaven help you if you’re trying to plane an edge on a rough 2m board with nothing more than a planing-stop, though. you’re likely to faceplant into the benchtop with your plane when the board starts to tip. but it’s your face so i’ll leave you to it. i use a vise. just to be clear, i only work on stock that’s firmly attached to the bench. i don’t do wedging things in a single direction. i’ve learned that lesson too many times. you will, too. or you can take my word for it and clamp everything securely now and save the pain. up to you.

you’ve been taught to take your jointer-plane and make sure you get a single, continuous shaving the entire length of both boards, preferably simultaneously. once you have that, you know the joint will go together smoothly — even if it’s not perfectly right-angled, it will still work because of the joys of math. which i’m not going to explain but assume it’s true. there’s nothing wrong with this — except clamps from here to the afterlife. to create a spring-joint, though, intentionally create a slight dip in the center by taking a (very, very light) pass in the center, another a little longer, continuing until you get to the outside. you should now have a valley in the middle. what you’re aiming for is invisible, just something you can feel, not something you can visibly determine is there unless you hold the boards together on-edge and shine a light through.

and that’s the easiest way to check. stick the boards together and make sure you can see a tiny sliver of light at the center that tapers to the edges where there’s absolutely no light. what you’re aiming for is perhaps the thickness of a single playing-card or a couple of sheets of printer-paper. this is a very slight joint. it’s not like making clamping-cauls. which i will talk about in a second but isn’t the same thing.

the idea is that you now only need to put pressure on the center of the joint and, as you clamp it more and more tightly, it will actually distribute the pressure along the curve. you can spring both sides of the joint or just one board — the effect will be the same. i do both sides because it’s easier to get a uniform taper that way but it works mathematically in either scenario. when you apply glue and clamp the boards in the center you’ll see the glue squeeze out at the ends then gradually start to do it more and more as you get closer to the center. when the glue squeezes out the center of the joint, you’ve got enough pressure and you can leave it to dry for as long as the glue takes to do that — usually overnight or whatever. take it out the clamp (yes, the single clamp — amaze!) and it’s done. now you can glue panels without the massive clamping investment. and you can even do it in your vise if you want — no clamps required. just do it flat on your bench and pinch the center of the boards between the dog in the vise and the dog on the bench. as long as it’s in the center, it should work the same way. the only thing to keep in mind is you have to make sure the boards don’t angle up or down when they’re being clamped. you can always add a few on the edges to balance the force in the direction of either face but you’re still not going to need the one-every-fifteen-centimeters kind of quantity you’d need for a flat joint.

so that’s a spring-joint. i wouldn’t bother for a short panel (like less than a half-meter) but it’s an excellent way to join large boards, especially when you are limited in terms of clamp availability. but you’ve probably thought you’ve heard something similar before — something i’ve talked about more than once. clamping-cauls. and those are awesome. and they work on a very similar principle so let’s just take a brief look at those while we’re on the subject of clamping without lots of clamps (or in the vise, as i often do for complex joints).

when you want two pieces to have uniform pressure, there are various ways to do it and a spring-joint is definitely one option. but, if you want to have straight mating-surfaces, you can add the pressure-distributing curve on the outside, too. in this case, it doesn’t mean you clamp with a single source of pressure in the center but two — one on each end. this can certainly be used for things like veneer but for simplicity let’s look at it being done for the same purpose we’ve already discussed — tabletops. in this case, you don’t need to plane the boards differently. just make sure you have two other boards that are smooth, level and square at least the length of the tabletop — it’s usually pretty easy to take a few long scraps and make these cauls. they don’t have to be nice wood. actually, you’re likely going to do them a fair amount of damage and they’ll be warped and cracked if you keep using the same ones for this. but you can use the same ones for many glueups.

take the tabletop boards and glue them together as normal, edge-to-edge. on the outside edges of the panel, add your sacrificial caul-strips. at this point, it just feels like you’re adding another board to the tabletop on each side. now take a small spacer — a scrap of wood maybe a couple of millimeters thick at most — and put it in the center between the caul and the next board on each side. now when you clamp down, the pressure will begin in the center and distribute itself along the entire length of the board. when the ends are pressed flush, you’ve got a complete curve of pressure-sharing. the thickness of the spacer will vary depending on the material but it’s probably going to need to be thicker than you imagine — wood really does bend a lot more under pressure than most people think possible, even maple or oak. if you’re making cauls from pine, just remember how warped those boards get simply from hanging off the ends of the shelves in the lumberyard and you’ll have a good mental-image of just how much you need to compensate for the internal flexibility to make a clamped curve.

anyway, glue isn’t generally all that exciting and, unless you’re not like me, this is the part of most projects that tends to be the most overwhelmingly boring. but it’s necessary. unless you regularly buy boards a half-meter wide, you’re going to end up with many projects (like tables) where a panel simply has to be glued together. or made from sheet goods. and while i love sheet goods this is generally not the best application for them unless you’re aiming for a veneered surface. i hope this is useful. enjoy your fall. but mostly enjoy your spring. thanks for reading.

cauls?

[estimated reading time 7 minutes]

when i was a child, i spent a lot of time in a town whose name struck me as odd — paradise. even at the time, i understood this was something like wishful-thinking. it was canada so we’re talking about a frozen wasteland much of the year where staying inside isn’t a choice as much as a necessity to avoid suicide-by-frostbite. but in the summer it was stunningly-beautiful in ways i don’t think i realized until i was much older. it is a place i now miss. but it’s the name i am thinking of particularly today. it has such a strong place in our history and culture, the notion of a perfect heaven. which is strange because there’s no such place and never has been. where did we get the idea of paradise and how did we as a culture become so fixated on someday living (or dying) there? of course, i teach writing and language so what interests me more than anything is where the word comes from. and it might shock you. it’s not from where you might think. it’s not even from the west. this word symbolizing the most ridiculous yet somehow overwhelming western cultural obsession for more than a thousand years — one that most people associate with christianity, the bible and an afterlife in the jesus-on-the-cross tradition — has its roots firmly in the east. that might not be nearly as surprising if you have studied the history of language. nearly all our language roots come from beyond the border of the indian subcontinent. our european languages were born in india and, in many cases, were born with a healthy dose of influence from the other side of the himalayas (though not specifically in this case unless there are some ancient chinese words for earth i’m not familiar with).

to start, the word “paradise” in its modern iteration realistically means “imaginary perfect place” but it has a sense of “protected garden”. this is interesting in many ways because that means it hasn’t shifted much in meaning in all the thousands of years since it first made an appearance. in vedic times, people believed earth was a walled-garden, protected by deities who expected obedience and veneration but in return guaranteed safety and happiness. the whole cultural notion of “the world” was something close to the story that much later became the genesis myth of the garden of eden but without the snake, the tree, the fruit or the rather awkward god figure being annoyed at a little fuckplay under the leafy canopy. ancient indian myth simply saw the world like a place where gods and humans interacted and safety and happiness came from willing coexistence. the subcontinent, not even close to a single nation at that point, was a loose collection of kingdoms and smaller pseudo-states, villages, cities with disparate rulers. their duty to the people, though, was seen as somewhere between taskmaster and guradian, intermediary between humans and deities but not the all-powerful we might imagine from an indian ruler today, looking back. these were much less absolute monarchs because they were restricted in their actions by cultural and social expectations — the gods demanded balance and making the gods unhappy was certain suicide. the world was a hard place to live but that was because humans weren’t very good at following the rules. it was as perfect as we could make it. and these people had a word for that — “पार्थिव” (par-thi-va) means “in the world” in the sense of “this is our earthly home”. their villages were the gardens they worked in every day thanks to the spirits they worshiped and venerated. it was the gift they thought they’d been given, not so much a planet as a safe place from an unknown outside. for thousands of years, this continued — there are other sanskrit variants from the same root, by the way, including “पार्थिवी” (par-thi-vi), loosely “of earth” like “we come from this place”, and “पार्थिव” (par-thi-va) that originally had the same context but eventually came to mean not only those from earth but a prince whose purpose was both to rule and protect the people in that place.

in time, though, these languages shifted and things became more specific as evolution occurred. let’s start at the beginning of the word’s trek to the west — old persian. for about a thousand years before the common-era and likely having its roots much more distant in time, what we now call “old persian” was spoken in modern-day iran (or, if you’re old enough, the nation of persia). this language isn’t nearly as old as it would need to be for this to be the real beginning (which is why we looked at sanskrit) but its roots are far deeper than just codified persian as its vocabulary, though little of its grammar, derives from the wandering tribes from across the region.

that explains the transmission of so many similar words but, by the time we get to the old-persian period, our word has become “paridaiza”, literally “pa-ri” (“around”, here we get “partition” and “parted” from), and “dai-za” (“wall”, oddly enough the root of our word “dais” and “daisy” but not “door”, which has an even stranger story).

at this point, the interpretation is more solid. it’s not just the implication of a protected space. it is exactly that, explicitly. ancient persian cities (if you’ve ever seen photographs of persepolis, this is a clear demonstration of the idea) were independent, walled places — not the low, agriculturally-useful walls of the subcontinent but protective, military fortresses holding back both the desert and the warriors from outside. the fortress was supplied by something loosely-analogous to an aquifer/aqueduct system of pressure-driven shallow wells linked to a water source — we’re talking about pre-deep-well days but they were definitely capable of irrigating their crops and the persian system was used as far away as greece and japan before newer technology deprecated it. so what you can have in mind is an oasis, a protected, walled garden where people could find food, safety and life in a harsh desert climate with nomadic marauders on the other side of the wall. in many ways, this was paradise in the modern sense. the persians might not have been perfect but, given the circumstances, it seems they certainly knew how to make the best of a bad situation.

from here, the word begins to float around a lot more. as persian trade took goods across the world, they encountered the other great civilizations of the time — the chinese to the east and the greeks to the west. the persians were actually the first civilization outside their own immediate area they ever encountered — and the only one they were prepared to pay much attention to. for centuries, the greeks traded and fought with the persians, eventually conquering them. but the persian languages (there were, in fact, many) had perhaps more lasting effects on greece and its children than greek culture had in return. greek, like aramaic and hebrew, borrowed vast chunks of linguistic material from ancient persia, acquiring not only the word “παράδεισος” (pa-ra-de-i-sos) but its complete meaning as both “protected, walled garden” and “perfect sanctuary from the outside world” — certainly an irony as the outside world coming to destroy and harm was, in fact, epitomized by the greek armies of conquest. greek cities, though, had walls, gardens, water and enemies of their own, though, so they were thankful for the concept.

greek passed the word and idea almost wholesale to latin as paradisus (from here on in, we’re talking about languages with latin alphabets so the pronunciation gets a bit simpler — “pa-ra-di-sus”. from latin, the path to english and other european languages is obvious. it became “paradis” (pa-ra-di) in french then flowed east to germany (“paradies” — “pa-ra-dis”) then back west to england (“paradise”).

but what happened to the idea? when paradise as a concept entered the contemporary vocabulary in the middle-east through aramaic and arabic, it became a very different thing — not a present reality but an ideal. these were areas where safe, walled cities weren’t the norm and living in the desert, traumatized by centuries of marauding and oppression, was was the expectation for daily life. add that to a culture of messianic afterlife-delivery and the notion of safety and a walled-garden seemed like something in the distant, deified past that we, as humans, could only hope for after death because it certainly wasn’t showing up in our lives. this meant the concept of “paradise” was mingled with that of “creation” in the genesis sense and “afterlife” in the jewish, arab and, eventually, muslim senses.

christianity is, practically-speaking, a modernized version not of post-messianic judaism with a revolutionary schism but a roman mystery-cult with a new figurehead and adopted scriptural past that’s summarily recited and ignored. from roman provincial rule, though, the language (latin) developed a mashup between the word “paradise” and the concept “heaven” borrowed from client states, primarily judea. the notion of a jewish mythical heaven or a bedouin afterlife in a walled oasis was transposed to a doctrinally-obsessive afterlife location for those who had earned it. what started as an indian “there’s no place like home” and became the persian “home is where the garden is” became the christian “i don’t think we’re in kansas anymore but it’s awesome as fuck”.

as christian culture gave way to modernization and ideas of afterlives and gods were finally, at long last, destroyed by scientific advances and people became more highly-educated, dismissing ancient mythologies for the population-control devices they were, especially state-organized christianity in the roman model, you might be tempted to imagine the word and its associated idealization of the afterlife and post-creation notions of gardens-and-falls would have fallen out of favor.

unfortunately, that wasn’t the case. the idea of paradise grew with the modern age as industrialization made life more and more painful and modernity carried a sense of daily overwhelm and self-imposed trauma through constantly being busy, overworked and focused on amassing personal property. culture stopped living in the garden and started living nothing than obsessive, competitive greed. so the idea of a walled, protected garden where competition was over, everything was safe and provided and life was no longer a series of necessities became more and more of a dream to escape to. with the hopelessness of applying education to the masses, there was nothing left of generalized understandings of science and notions of the afterlife persisted — people are still actually buried in the west as whole bodies, wasting land and resources as if the body is useful in a post-death sense and people are still, unaccountably, given a choice whether their internal organs are even permitted to be used after they are dead to save the life of a child desperate for help. paradise as an idea became more of an obsession as belief-systems were showed to be more and more false. it was something people grabbed and held tightly to the point they named their cities and dreams in its honor.

that’s the story, though. from the ancient sanskrit-speaking world of india to our materialistic, self-indulgent paradise-seeking culture today focused on an afterlife that can’t possibly come but unwilling to truly create a peaceful walled-garden life in this world because it would mean slowing down and having less. the word evolved as cultures devolved around it. this may be one of the most ironic tales of language through the ages. thanks for coming along on this journey with me. may you take a few moments today and see how you can build a paradise in your life, if only by simply choosing to be at peace rather than to do more, have more and experience more. may you be happier in a paradise of less. नमस्ते (“na-ma-ste”, “i bow to you”).

[estimated reading time 6 minutes]

when you think of japanese poetry, i suspect the first thing that comes to mind is the haiku — a surprisingly-modern invention in a country with more than a thousand years of formal poetic history. that being said, the haiku and its extended version, the renga, are probably the most inherently-japanese of poetic forms. they are, however, extremely poorly-understood in the west. let’s take a look at some of the common misconceptions and how to actually write them in english in a way that’s useful in a modern context.

a haiku is not a poem with seventeen syllables. even in japanese, that’s not the case. historically, it was typically a relatively-fixed number of characters per line but those characters weren’t necessarily words or syllables and counting them is far less important. the obsession and fixation with syllable-counts and rhyming that has destroyed western poetry, especially english poetry, has overflowed into the interpretation of japanese forms in the original language and english. it is simply not true.

this variation is not simply an exception to a rule. there is no rule. here is, most-likely, the most famous haiku — a poem by basho.

古池や 蛙飛び込む 水の音

as you can see, there is no three-line division with five, seven and five syllables. and counting the characters also doesn’t result in anything close to that. an english version of this poem could read…

ripples shatter the surface of her face
as love shocks her awake
the sound of nature

or perhaps

diving through the pond’s surface
the frog seeks its mate
stunned by impact

as you can see, there is no particular need for pattern in terms of sound or anything to count. here’s a simple way of thinking about poetry. if you are thinking about how many syllables or lines something has, you’re doing it wrong. it never works that way. if you care how many words, syllables, characters or lines a poem has, you’ve missed the point and have ended up in a lost and degenerate past before modern language swept away the garbage of history.

the other thing to remember about haiku is that it’s not always three lines (or three statements). there are two modern forms — the short haiku and the long renga. these are usually written in english as two or three statements (in the case of haiku) with the possibility of a two-statement response (renga). the difference isn’t that they’re separate styles as much as the renga being a haiku with a built-in response.

the other thing that tends to be overlooked in these poems is the assumption that they were composed as western poems were — by master poets secluded in candle-lit rooms and isolated forest clearings after serious contemplation. that’s not even close to the truth. while there were certainly poetry masters, poetry was an inherent part of traditional life in japan. people composed poetry (yes, even common people, though the poetry was less-refined) for all occasions. feeling lonely? write a poem. visiting a mountain? write a poem. meet someone for a date? write a poem. they were memory devices and reflections on culture. if you were an educated person, poetry was part of your life. if you weren’t, you probably wanted to be an poetry was part of your aspiration.

this isn’t even the most significant part of the history, though. these poems were typically written as parts of conversation. there wasn’t a sharp division between poetry and speech and writing in the prose sense. if you ever get a chance to read “the tale of genji”, for example, you will discover almost every new event is commemorated with poetry. and the author inserts literally hundreds in the story to communicate a moment or emotional shift. but this conversational nature of poetry is even more inherent in the more formal haiku/renga style. these are meant to be cyclic or at least paired.

we meet. i write you a poem. you write a response. now you write a poem and i write a response. we have composed poetry together. mine is inherently linked with yours. there are certainly poems that were written independently — and many where groups of poems were written by the same person rather than as part of a real conversation. but the important thing to remember is that these are meant to be interactive, not solitary works. they’re often not intended to stand alone. they participate in a cultural conversation even if they’re not explicitly part of direct interpersonal speech. every poem has the implication built-in that there are deeper meanings in certain words and concepts and that they will evoke memories of other poems and even other literary forms.

for example, in the poem we just saw, the frog is a symbol of love. anyone hearing basho’s original would understand he meant this. the pond is a symbol of purity. and waves are a traditional symbol of talking. these allusions would not have gone unnoticed by even the simplest and youngest of listeners. without them, the poem is a relatively-meaningless statement about an everyday event. with them, it is a commentary on the shocking nature of love and expectation and how deeply someone can be shifted but show only small ripples on the surface of daily life.

with that being said, how do you write a haiku?

well, the first thing you likely want to do is stop thinking of writing a haiku. what you want to do is write two. they are far easier to write as pairs. i suggest starting with the short version because it’s surprisingly difficult to write the longer ones until you get the hang of the images. but we’ll begin there — with images.

the haiku is not a story. it’s a single snapshot of a moment. we’ll write a few examples together. and work through them. let’s imagine i walk into the forest on the first day of spring and hear a bird singing. i am struck by how beautiful it is but how sad it sounds and wonder if they have lost their partner during the cold winter, either to the danger of the seasons or a hunter. i want to capture that in a poem…

snow disappears in song
yet sadness echoes against the leaves
this first day of spring

now i have a simple haiku but i haven’t said everything i want to say. but i have a whole second verse to write that will give my reaction to the first.

the frost of fallen wings
drips tears into each note
remembered with love

i have now completed the thought and expressed what i want to say about the birdsong and the bird’s lost partner.

perhaps i can go deeper than this in a few short lines, though. let’s take another example and see the images. i am sitting by a lake watching the leaves fall and realize it is echoing my mood. i feel like i am in the fall of my life, summer already ended and the winter of old-age coming all too quickly on the air. perhaps i can share this through a pair of poems. remember, it’s far easier once you have a clear idea of the image rather than diving in.

leaves lose their grip on reality
and drop intoxicated by a desire for depth
through the surface of the lake

water still soft with fall
i find myself on my knees
begging winter to wait

of course, these are purely for demonstrative purposes and you are welcome to take your own examples. let’s look at a way to plan for success writing haiku — the plan also works for renga.

first, think of a single snapshot of a moment. you’re not trying to tell a story, just describe a scene. this is traditionally a scene of seasonal beauty or love but you can realistically pick anything you like. a beautiful sunset, shocking storm, sudden sensation of loneliness, single word that made you feel angry. it all works but write what you are experiencing as an image.

second, think about what that snapshot means in a more objective, generalized way. write this, too. what will it mean when you look back on it tomorrow. is it still beautiful? shocking? meaningless?

third, write the description. begin with a statement (one or two lines) then react to it.

fourth, write a response. this is intended to be from a greater distance. what does it mean from the outside. you can think of the first poem being extremely subjective — your reaction in the moment. the second is an external perspective. not necessarily someone else’s but a more considered, less-emotional place. this doesn’t have to be how it’s written but it will give you a good starting place.

if you want to reach higher and write renga, this process gets a little longer but it’s the same idea. after you write your first statement and reaction, think more deeply. the next two statements should be reflections — one immediate response in a few words then a few words with more significance.

let’s take a look at an example.

a face shimmering in the distance
consumed by the beauty of a candle
yet unaware of the rain
water dancing between lines of smoke
incapable of breaking her concentration

this is in some ways a story but it happens in a moment, only a snapshot. you can imagine the rest of the story but it’s not actually happening in the poem, only implied. the writer sees a girl in the distance whose face is completely engaged looking into a candle and the rain having started is simply not something she has noticed. even splashing around the flame doesn’t seem to bother either the candle or her.

the reactions don’t have to be emotionally-deep or have significant meaning. the beauty of this poetry often comes from simple depictions of daily life using beautiful phrases and words. as you write haiku/renga, try to use words that sound good together. say your lines into the room and listen to how they echo, how they feel on your tongue. they shouldn’t feel forced or cumbersome. try to make each line feel like you can say it effortlessly while sighing.

this is only a very simple introduction, of course. but i think even now you will be prepared to write your own haiku. there is only one way to get better at this — as with all other things in life. do it many times. practice. write one then its pair. do it again. try the same theme a dozen times. or a hundred. you will perfect it if you keep at it.

i hope that’s been useful. may the muse within you tempt your tongue to speak beautiful verse. thanks for reading.