Allusionist 228. Draculae part 2: Surprises in the Vaults
This is the second episode of the Draculae miniseries, about a literary mystery which came to me via a meme: “Someone translated Dracula into Icelandic, and it took over 100 years for…
Allusionist 227. Draculae part 1: Enter the Castle
In this first instalment of a short series about three versions of Dracula, we familiarise ourselves with the plots of Dracula published by Bram Stoker in 1897; the Icelandic version…
Allusionist 221. Scribe
"I have never felt so naked. That's how exposed I felt at the idea that my handwriting was going to be seen by the world," says Tim Brookes, founder of…
Allusionist 180. Project ENABLE
Sterling Martin was in grad school, studying C. elegans worms, when COVID19 hit and suddenly he found himself in lexicography, as part of a team creating a Navajo-English dictionary of…
Allusionist 61: In Your Hand
Since it caught on a couple of hundred years ago, graphology - analysing handwriting to deduce characteristics of the writer - has struggled to be taken seriously as a practice.…
Allusionist 65. Eponyms III: Who’s That Guy?
So It turns out calling a person guy or saying “you guys” comes from Guy Fawkes.
Technobabble
UK podcast star Helen Zaltzman of The Allusionist helps me figure out why one set of poorly understood pseudo-scientific terms can sink a scene, while another set can make a…
Allusionist 60: Zillions
They look like numbers. They sound like numbers. You kinda know they are numbers. But they're not actually numbers. Linguistic anthropologist Stephen Chrisomalis explains what's going on with indefinite hyperbolic…
Allusionist 58: Eclipse
It's August 2007. Lauren Marks is a 27-year-old actor and a PhD student, spending the month directing a play at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. She's in a bar, standing onstage,…