history
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The Forgotten Poet
You could visit India and never hear the name Rabindranath Tagore. In fact, if you don’t live in India, you may well have never known Rabindranath Tagore existed. But this was not always the case: recipient of the Nobel Prize…
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The (Im)Purity of Language
At JSTOR Daily, linguist Chi Luu makes a case for emphasizing grammar rules that follow popular usage, rather than the pedantic standards set by centuries-dead classicists. Here are the plain facts: many of these pop grammar rules… were magically pulled…
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It’s Complicated, Starring Religion and Archaeology
Rose Eveleth writes for Aeon on the complicated relationship between religion and archaeology and how both have shaped how we tell the story of the world. It’s impossible to do archaeology objectively. Even determining what constitutes a sacred object is…
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The Birds and the Bees and Aristotle
To many a browser upon a bookstall, the name Aristotle in the title meant—nudge nudge wink wink—a book about sex. For the Public Domain Review, Mary Fissell examines Aristotle’s Masterpiece, a 17th-century sex manual that made the ancient philosopher’s name a dirty…
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The Real True Detective
Before True Detective, the TV show, there was True Detective, the pulp magazine with stories like “Sex Monster At Large” and “I Hit Her with the Bowling Pin.” True Crime looks at the life and death of the graphic publication.
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Rewriting Autism
Elon Green writes about the complicated history of autism research for the Atlantic: But the damage done by Kanner, intentionally or otherwise, is inescapable. For far too long he perpetuated ideas about autistic children that were simply not true. And for…
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Meet the Oldest Multicolor Printed Book
At Hyperallergic, Allison Meier offers a history of the oldest multicolor printed book, recently digitized and published online by the Cambridge University Library system. The manual [the 17th-century Manual of Calligraphy and Painting (Shi zhu zhai shu hua pu)] is…
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Machiavelli: Prince of Comedy
You could argue that Machiavelli’s entire worldview was comic, but comic in a peculiar way: ironic, wry, a little melancholy, punctuated by an earthy vulgarity that, these days, would get him thrown off a university faculty in a minute. The…
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Hoaxing History
The mythology of the New World – as expansive as the continent itself – engendered a mania for magical thinking, for reinvigorating Old-World myths in a land that still felt only half-real…. a land without myths can be a lonely…
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Why We Write with Words
For wherever writing seems to achieve preeminence as a tool of the powerful, we find at that moment that it becomes possible to take it apart and turn it upon itself, a line of that same material quickened once more…
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Steve Stern
The Rumpus Book Club chats with Steve Stern about his new novel The Pinch, about what it means for Jews to be “people of the book,” and how fiction and history can be entwined in entertaining and challenging ways.
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Cocaine Wine
In 1863, chemist Angelo Mariani created Vin Mariani, a combination of Bordeaux wine and coca leaves (you know, where cocaine comes from). As you can imagine, it was an instant hit. Advertisements promised to “restore health and vitality,” cure malaria,…