Not Just the Tudors: When Europe met Islam
In the Early Modern period the boundaries between Christian and Islamic civilisations were far more porous than we imagine: Isaac Newton’s library included Arabic biographies of the Prophet Muhammad; the…
Chinese Porcelain
A BBC Documentry
The Doorkeepers
by A. T. Greenblatt in Uncanny Magazine Issue Sixty-Eight | 8840 Words
A Genius Can Always Get Their Hands on a Violin
No one will remember me, but they will remember him and that’s enough, isn’t it, for him to be the legendary one and for me to think that by giving…
History Extra podcast: Giuseppe Garibaldi
He led one of history's most celebrated guerrilla campaigns, showed remarkable political acumen, and drove aristocratic English women wild. Is it any wonder that Giuseppe Garibaldi is one of the…
A brief history of singular ‘they’
The Oxford English Dictionary traces singular they back to 1375, where it appears in the medieval romance William and the Werewolf.
What is the Kaaba?
religion for breakfast
Scientists mimicking the Big Bang accidentally turn lead into gold
Medieval alchemists dreamed of transmuting lead into gold. Today, we know that lead and gold are different elements, and no amount of chemistry can turn one into the other. But…
Sister Helen
In 1982, Sister Helen Prejean was invited to write a letter to a man on death row named Elmo Patrick Sonnier. She told us, “I thought that all I was…
Future Knowledge: The Public Domain
What do jazz, gene sequences, and the World Wide Web have in common? They all reveal what’s at stake when our cultural commons shrinks. In this episode, James Boyle, author…