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…
The Medieval Tropics
In much of the tropics, insects, heat, and humidity meant that even if texts were written on palm leaves and animal skins, they had to be deliberately preserved or copied…
Meet Mary Somerville: The Brilliant Woman for Whom the Word “Scientist” Was Coined
That women should face such an Everestine climb toward inclusion and equality is a piece of curious and rather cruel cultural irony, for the very word “scientist” didn’t always have…
The 100th birthday of Indian chemist Asima Chatterjee
For the latest Google Doodle, the search giant is honoring an award-winning chemist whose research in organic chemistry had a profound impact on how plants are used for medicinal purposes.…
Catastrophe
n 1993, more than 1,000 levees broke along the Mississippi River, flooding thousands of acres. Most of these cases were accidents due to the river rising well above its usual…
The Hero’s Journey and the Monomyth: Crash Course World Mythology #25
Let’s get Heroic with Mike Rugnetta. This week on Crash Course World Mythology, we’re talking about the Hero’s Journey and the Monomyth, as described by Joseph Campbell. Campbell’s theories about…
Refresh Your Mind
This week, Manoush’s book - the book that started with you, listeners - hits the shelves. To encourage you to #GetBored and find brilliance, we made a weird earworm. It’s…
Hey! it’s the 150 anniversary of the publication of Capital by Karl Marx.
Here are all three volumes (in English) in PDF form.
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 Voynich Manuscript and Truth on the Internet
It can be a little frightening for medievalists to see self-evidently wrongheaded interpretations spread like wood lice.