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.
Why Science-Fiction Writers Couldn’t Imagine the Internet
On Star Trek, humans talked to computers—they even used something like floppy disks and memory sticks—but nowhere did crew members get information from ethereal machines whose locations and identities were…
Fire Management May Date Back 40,000 Years
Researchers Simon Haberle of Australian National University, and fire ecologist David Bowman, in cooperation with the Tasmanian Aboriginal Center, dated charcoal and pollen in the core sample, and determined that…
How the Vietnam War Broke the American Presidency
The war opened the credibility gap. What we’ve learned since has only widened it. LBJ: It’s damned easy to get in a war, but it’s going to be awfully hard…