A Whale-Oiled Machine – 99% Invisible
In the 1800s, whaling was a vast and brutal industry–sometimes as deadly for the sailors involved as it was for the whales. And the global epicenter of whaling could be…
The Pain Reliever – PoetryNow
After an artist residency at Chicago’s International Museum of Surgical Science, Carrie Olivia Adams celebrates the lives of pioneering women in medicine during the nineteenth century.
The Berlin Conference on the Breakdown
with dara tucker
Confession of a Feminist
A serialized biography of Jane Grant (1892-1972), first woman reporter at The New York Times and co-founder of The New Yorker {read}
Subversive, queer and terrifyingly relevant: six reasons why Moby-Dick is the novel for our times
But it is Moby-Dick’s premonitory brilliance that continues to make it relevant. Melville predicts mass extinction and climate breakdown, and foresees a drowned planet from which the whale would “spout…
How Abandoned and Eroding Victorian Mansions of the Gilded Age Came to Symbolize Impending Doom
In a portentous video essay for Vox, producer Coleman Lowndes explains why the highly decorated, overly trimmed Victorian mansions (McMansions of their time) of the Gilded Age went from being…
Herman Melville: From obscurity to immortality
When he died at age 72, on September 28, 1891, Herman Melville was so obscure that those who even remembered his literary output presumed that he had passed away many…
Proms Extra: Opium and Creativity in the 19th c.
From Thomas De Quincy via Coleridge to Berlioz, a second-generation opium addict, Daisy Hay and Richard Davenport-Hines discuss why drugs were thought integral to creativity first in England and later…
The Stethoscope – 99% Invisible
In the early 1800s, an invention came along that changed everything. Suddenly the doctor could clearly hear what was happening inside the body. The heart, the lungs, the breath. This…
The Soprano Who Upended Americans’ Racist Stereotypes About Who Could Sing Opera
Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield was in many ways the nation’s first black pop star