history
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Europe’s First Taste of Chocolate
And what do we make of chocolate? Are you not afraid that it will burn your blood? Could it be that these miraculous effects mask some kind of inferno [in the body]? The Public Domain Review examines 17th century texts…
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500 Years of Drunk
How many different words are there for “intoxicated”? Quite a lot, as it turns out—writers have been inventing new words to describe inebriation for just about as long as they’ve been drinking. A new book exploring the history of synonyms…
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Tolstoy on Film
On what would have been the author’s 186th birthday, New Republic highlighted some rare footage of Leo Tolstoy at the end of his life.
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Rewriting History
Salon has published an excerpt from Edward E. Baptist’s new book about the relationship between slavery and the development of capitalism in America. In it, he identifies the ways in which the American master narrative has written slavery out of…
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The Lost Pulp of Gore Vidal
Before he became an acclaimed novelist and political commentator, Gore Vidal was just a guy trying to make ends meet. Under three different pseudonyms, Vidal wrote a romance novel, three mysteries, and a crime thriller. Now, over 50 years later, …
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Again from the Ground Up
Before the mid-1970’s, Somalia had no written alphabet to speak of. In 1972, the Somali government introduced a standard written alphabet, and literacy rates climbed from a measly 5% to nearly 60%. Unfortunately, as an effect of the civil war,…
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Writing Blind
Writing and revising can be challenging under the best of circumstances, but imaging being unable to see the words on the page. At The Airship Daily, Tammy Ruggles writes about her life as a visually impaired writer: Before the computer…
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Omitted History
What creates a history? Is it the stories we tell, the events we record, the texts we study, the myths that are told and retold? All of this and more, certainly. But sometimes, history resides in the omissions, in the…
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Weekly Geekery
How should we handle digital memories? Do we keep them or erase them from our hard drives? Why does Pocahontas endure? Facebook is emotionally manipulating you more than your mother. Welcoming our robot overlords. You aren’t the only one concerned…
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Before QWERTY
Before life on the iPad keypad there was life on the QWERTY computer keypad, and before that, the architecture of the typewriter. Dan Piepenbring reports on the history of the typewriter which was, ah yes, “rife with collaboration, ingenuity, betrayal, setbacks, lucre,…
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Soho Press, a History
Founded in 1986, independent publisher Soho Press has built its reputation on engaging literary novels, a catalog of international authors, and a crime fiction imprint. The press has thrived even through an era of upheaval in the publishing and book…
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The New York Comics & Picture-Story Symposium: Interview with Nick Bertozzi
The New York Comics & Picture-Story Symposium is a weekly forum for discussing the tradition and future of text/image work. Open to the public, it meets Tuesday nights from 7-9 p.m. EST in New York City.