Making 200-Year-Old Mayonnaise – How has it changed?
Mayonnaise (or magnonnaise, as Carême calls it in this recipe from 1828), didn’t really become popular until the early 19th century. First popular in France, by the 1850s, cookbooks in…
The Grasshoppers Are Coming!
by Alicia. She was reading a book about Laura Ingalls Wilder, and one chapter was all about this horrendous grasshopper invasion from the 1800s! It shocked AJ so much, and…
Cautionary Tales: The Lovestruck Explorer’s Deadly Guessing Game
In 1860, police officer Robert O’Hara Burke plans an expedition to map the mysterious blank in the centre of Australia. Joining him is scientist William Wills, and a ragtag team of…
Kalmykia – Europe’s Only Buddhist Region
Welcome to Europe's only Buddhist Region - Kalmykia. Some 160,000 Buddhists live here. Kalmykia is an autonomous republic of the Russian Federation, located between the Caucasus and the Caspian Sea.…
Entrepreneur à la vie rocambolesque et pionnier du livre de poche
Si vous lisez des livres en format poche, c’est en partie grâce à cet éditeur à la vie rocambolesque, Emanuel Haldeman-Julius. Dès 1919, ce militant socialiste, entrepreneur visionnaire, ami de…
Pourquoi on s’est trompé sur Auguste Renoir. Visite au Musée d’Orsay
Ses reproductions de tableaux mièvres ont plombé notre regard sur l’œuvre du maître de l’impressionnisme. Sauvons Renoir du syndrome de la boîte de chocolats ou du calendrier du facteur. Avec…
Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer
Renaissance history is so much wilder and weirder than you would have expected. Very fun chatting with Ada Palmer (historian, novelist, and composer based at the University of Chicago).
The Atlas Obscura Podcast: The Family That Tried To Escape History
In 1978, a team of Soviet geologists working deep in the Siberian taiga came across something they never expected to see: a house. As it turned out, they had stumbled…
The Pentagon Threatened Pope Leo XIV’s Ambassador With the Avignon Papacy
The Free Press has documented a closed-door Pentagon meeting in which a senior Trump official lectured Pope Leo XIV’s ambassador on American military supremacy.
The Hazy Evolution of Cannabis
How did such a strange plant like cannabis come to be in the first place? When and where did we first domesticate it? And why oh why does it get…