History and Culture
Trade, cities, writing, memory, archaeology, and the long shape of human life.
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Essays & Stories
Long-form essays on language learning, retold folk tales with vocabulary notes, and science pieces written the way we'd want to read them. Hand-edited, sources cited, no streak guilt.
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In 1843 a young mathematician published an algorithm for a machine that had not yet been built. Almost everything about that sentence is unusual.
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In 1901 a sponge diver brought up a corroded lump of bronze from a Roman shipwreck. It took the next century to work out that it was a Greek astronomical computer, built more than 2,000 years ago.
Sixty-six million years ago, on a day late in spring or early in summer, a rock 10 kilometres across hit the Yucatán at 20 kilometres per second. The next 24 hours have been reconstructed in considerable detail.
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Trade, cities, writing, memory, archaeology, and the long shape of human life.
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In 1843 a young mathematician published an algorithm for a machine that had not yet been built. Almost everything about that sentence is unusual.
In 1901 a sponge diver brought up a corroded lump of bronze from a Roman shipwreck. It took the next century to work out that it was a Greek astronomical computer, built more than 2,000 years ago.
Sixty-six million years ago, on a day late in spring or early in summer, a rock 10 kilometres across hit the Yucatán at 20 kilometres per second. The next 24 hours have been reconstructed in considerable detail.
He started losing his hearing in his late twenties. By 1818 he was completely deaf. In that decade he wrote the Ninth Symphony, the late string quartets, the Hammerklavier sonata, and most of his greatest music. The question of how is one of the more interesting puzzles in the history of music.
A town on the island of Thera, painted with extraordinary frescoes, was buried by a volcanic eruption around 1600 BCE. The eruption was the largest of the second millennium BCE. The frescoes preserve a marine, peaceful civilisation that almost nothing else records.
Karl von Frisch worked out what the honeybee waggle dance meant in 1944. Sixty years of follow-up experiments show that bees can count, judge symmetry, do basic arithmetic, and recognise the concept of zero.
It ran at 0.043 megahertz with 64 kilobytes of read-only memory. It navigated three astronauts to the Moon and back. During the lunar descent it threw alarms five times in two minutes. The astronauts landed anyway.
A West African folk tale, retold from Ashanti sources — with notes on the Twi words English borrowed across the Atlantic.