Neil deGrasse Tyson Selects the Eight Books Every Intelligent Person on the Planet Should Read
How to “glean profound insight into most of what has driven the history of the western world.”
The Athletic Brassiere
Among the most important advances in sports technology, few can compete with the invention of the sports bra. Following the passage of Title IX in 1972, women’s interest in athletics…
The Great Communicator, Vietnam Syndrome and Another Mass Atrocity
Empire equals militarism. In order to maintain an empire, a nation must make either threats of violence or violence to bear to bring outliers into the fold. Both forms of…
Grandma Turned Me into a Ghost
Who were the very first people who helped solidify your identity? The people who really influenced the way you see yourself and how you interact with the world? For most of us,…
Christianity and the classical world
Classicist and journalist Catherine Nixey talks about her new book The Darkening Age with Professor Edith Hall. Their discussion explores the momentous changes that occurred when Christianity became the dominant…
Homage to Catalonia – George Orwell
Though the POUM were socialists, he wrote “as far as my purely personal preferences went I would have liked to join the Anarchists."His vivid descriptions of classless anarchist Barcelona following…
Noam Chomsky on the terror state that is the united states
the terror states of the west
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…