The Value of a Flower

17th century Europe was an era of emerging luxury in which status was often defined by the one's ability to conquer the wild and take control of its beauty.  In order to display ones wealth, a flower collection was needed. Like anything within a society, the value of flowers was decided by rarity, which due to a strange sequence of events created a brief moment when tulip bulbs were counted amongst the most valuable objects on earth.

Tulip cultivation in Europe was started in the Netherlands around 1593 by the Flemish botanist Charles de l'Écluse, who had received a collection of tulip bulbs as a gift from the Ottoman Empire. Tulips grow from bulbs, and can be propagated through both seeds and buds. Seeds from a tulip will form a flowering bulb after 7–12 years. When a bulb grows into the flower, the original bulb will disappear, but a clone bulb forms in its place, as do several buds. Properly cultivated, these buds will become bulbs of their own.

Certain color varieties like striped tulips could only be grown through buds, not seeds, and so cultivating the most appealing varieties took years. Tulips bloom in April and May for only about a week, and the secondary buds appear shortly thereafter.

As the flowers grew in popularity, professional growers paid higher and higher prices for bulbs. By 1634, in part as a result of demand from the French, speculators began to enter the market. In 1636, the Dutch created a type of formal futures markets where contracts to buy bulbs at the end of the season were bought and sold. This trade was centered in Haarlem during the height of a bubonic plague epidemic, which may have contributed to a culture of fatalistic risk taking.

The contract price of rare bulbs continued to rise throughout 1636. At its zenith, a single tulip bulb was valued at the equivalent of $400,000. However in February 1637, tulip bulb contract prices collapsed abruptly and the trade of tulips ground to a halt.

Why Are We So Obsessed with Fantasy?

Why are we so into science fiction and fantasy? Nineteenth-century German sociologist Max Weber had a useful theory about this: The answer may be that we in the West are disenchanted. The world in which we live feels explainable, predictable, and boring. Weber posited that because of modern science, a rise in secularism, an impersonal market economy, and government administered through bureaucracies rather than bonds of loyalty, Western societies perceive the world as knowably rational and systematic, leading to a widespread loss of a sense of wonder and magic. Because reality is composed of processes that can be identified with a powerful-enough microscope or calculated with a fast-enough computer, so Weber’s notion of disenchantment goes, there is no place for mystery. 

By Christine Folch for The Atlantic

What is Juice From Concentrate?

Most of juice is water. Water is a heavy, bulky substance that is expensive to ship. So most juices are concentrated by evaporating most of the water and leaving behind a thick liquid. Then the concentrate is shipped to wherever it needs to go, and a local bottling plant adds the right amount of water to the concentrate to produce juice again. Juices not from concentrate are more expensive (all that water was shipped the entire distance), but they’re usually said to taste a little better and the concentrating process risks losing very fragile components.

The Rise of the Anti-Pope

An antipope is a person who, in opposition to the one who is generally seen as the legitimately elected Pope, makes a significantly accepted competing claim to be the Pope, the Bishop of Rome and leader of the Roman Catholic Church. At times between the 3rd and mid-15th century, antipopes were supported by a fairly significant faction of religious cardinals and secular kings and kingdoms.

The period in which antipopes were most numerous was during the struggles between the popes and the Holy Roman Emperors of the 11th and 12th centuries. The emperors frequently imposed their own nominees to further their own causes. The popes, likewise, sometimes sponsored rival imperial claimants (anti-kings) in Germany to overcome a particular emperor.

The Western Schism—which began in 1378, when the French cardinals, claiming that the election of Pope Urban VI was invalid, elected Clement VII as Pope—led to two rival lines of claimants to the papacy: the Roman line and the Avignon line (Clement VII took up residence in Avignon, France). To end the schism, with the support of King Sigismund of Germany, a special Catholic council was created to force the competing popes to abdicate, so that another could be chosen.

In May 1415, the Council of Constance forced Pope Gregory XII of the Roman line to resign in July 1415. In 1417, the Council also formally deposed Benedict XIII of Avignon, but he refused to resign. Afterwards, Pope Martin V was elected and was accepted everywhere except in the small and rapidly diminishing area that remained faithful to Benedict XIII. 

The scandal of the Western Schism created anti-papal sentiment and fed into the Protestant Reformation at the turn of the 16th century.

A Soviet Solution to the Capitalist Olympics

The Spartakiad was the name of an international sports event that the Soviet Union invented in the late 1920s to both oppose and supplement the Olympics.

The name, derived from the name of the slave rebel leader,Spartacus, was supposed to symbolize proletarian internationalism because Spartacus’ revolt united slaves from diverse ethnic backgrounds within the Roman Empire. As a Classical figure, Spartacus also stood directly in contrast to the aristocratic nature of the Ancient Olympic Games on which the modern “capitalist” Olympics were, according to the Soviet hierarchy, supposedly based.

The first Winter Spartakiad was held in February 1928 in Oslo, and the first Summer Spartakiad was held in August 1928 in Moscow.  In 1952 the Soviet Union decided to join the Olympic movement, and international Spartakiads ceased. However the term persisted for internal sports events in the Soviet Union of different levels, from local up to the Spartakiad of the Peoples of the USSR. The latter event was held twice in four years: Winter Spartakiad and Summer Spartakiad, with international participation.

The first Soviet Spartakiad was held in 1956. These events were of huge importance for Soviet sports. Everyone could participate in them - from ordinary people to top-level athletes. The number of participants, for example, in the 6th Summer Spartakiad of the Peoples of the USSR, was 90 million people (twice the number of athletes in the USSR in that time).