Allusionist: Curse Soup
Somebody has really ticked you off. You're all steamed up inside and you want to vent that rage using words, but you don't want to confront them directly because you're…
Seduced & Abandoned: The Body in the Virtual World – The Feminine Cyberspace
Seduced & Abandoned was one of a series of ICA conferences (spanning 12-13 March, 1994) held under the umbrella title Towards the Aesthetics of the Future that explored the connections…
What Did 17th Century Food Taste Like?
Guessing the true flavors of these ingredients—the taste of premodern chicken, or mace carried in a ship's hold from Indonesia to Europe, or butter that was churned by hand—is at…
Whatever happened to Winamp? (which you can still download, by the way)
Fifteen to twenty years ago, Winamp was the MP3 player that everyone used. It was the first MP3 player not to suck: playlists, shuffle, convenience. I asked friends on Facebook…
Rachel Carson on Writing and the Loneliness of Creative Work
Many of the titans of literature have left, alongside a body of work that models powerful writing, abiding advice on the craft that examines the source of that power. Unrivaled…
Free: Download 5.3 Million Images from Books Published Over Last 500 Years
Rather than using optical character recognition (OCR), as most digitization software does to scan only the text of books, Leetaru’s code reversed the process, extracting the images the Internet Archive’s…
The Mysterious Art of Belkis Ayón Daringly Sheds Light on One of Cuba’s Secret Societies
Belkis Ayón took her own life at the age of just 32, cutting short the Cuban artist’s promising career. Yet she left behind a prolific body of innovative prints, mostly in…
‘Alias Grace’ Is a Fierce, Timely Adaptation of Atwood’s Masterpiece
It’s easy to say Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace speaks to the cultural moment. But that “moment” — the predatory sexual behavior of men and the undue burden it places on…
Suffragists’ Night of Terror at the Occoquan Workhouse
In November 1917, guards at the Occoquan Workhouse assaulted and terrorized 33 women from the National Woman’s Party. They were serving sentences for charges like “obstructing sidewalk traffic” after peacefully…
Brandon Seifert on Werewolves | The Weird History Podcast
Brandon Seifert has written horror comics such as Witch Doctor, Hellraiser, and The Fly. Lately, he’s been studying werewolf folklore. We talked about the history of werewolf stories, werewolf witch…