When humans stopped being nomadic, we could no longer walk away from our waste. We’ve been battling it ever since. | Continue reading
On the law and mythologies of haunting, from antiquity to today. | Continue reading
In the 1920s, radio was an exciting new mass medium. It was known for providing entertainment, but educators wondered if it could also be used for education. | Continue reading
“o man can justly doubt, that a childs mind is answerable to his nurses milk and manners.” | Continue reading
Orientalism is alive and well in the wildly popular franchise, argues one scholar. | Continue reading
Ancient Romans saw the rituals of professional sorcerers as foreign and suspicious. But how else were you supposed to become invisible? | Continue reading
For some creators, death isn’t the end of their career. How should we think about completing and releasing their work afterward? | Continue reading
Today’s headlines make climate change seem like a recent discovery. But Eunice Newton Foote and others have been piecing it together for centuries. | Continue reading
Why did the Russian tsar seek to ban beards? | Continue reading
The promise of commercial spaceflight raises questions about how untrained travelers will endure the extreme hostility of space. | Continue reading
Maya Deren was a fringe filmmaker who existed far outside the Hollywood machine, but she often borrowed its tactics to promote herself and her movies. | Continue reading
Rumor had it that these machines were once the Prince’s servants, whom he murdered and transformed into anatomical displays. Scholars showed otherwise. | Continue reading
Throughout the history of philosophy, literature, art, and science, people have been fascinated with the shimmering surfaces of soap bubbles. | Continue reading
Apparently some people communed with spirits to locate the first underground oil reserves. | Continue reading
When Rome burned in 192 CE, the city's vibrant community of scholars was devastated. The physician Galen described the scale of the loss. | Continue reading
Before the infamous Wannsee conference, Nazis had another meeting during which they planned the mass starvation of millions of Eastern Europeans. | Continue reading
In the 1960s, over seventy scientists and graduate students traveled to U.S. outlying islands as part of the Pacific Ocean Biological Survey Program. | Continue reading
Video games offer many LGBTQ+ people avenues for meaning, community, and escape, but in-game cultures of harassment still pose serious problems. | Continue reading
Professional applauders, collectively known as the “claque,” helped mold the tastes of an uncertain audience. | Continue reading
Analyzing the dolls of elite girls shows that playthings reinforced gendered expectations but also allowed for imaginative play. | Continue reading
Bourbaki was gnomic and mythical, impossible to pin down; his mathematics just the opposite: unified, unambiguous, free of human idiosyncrasy. | Continue reading
Imagine tourists flocking to a famous beauty spot, only to turn around and fix their eyes on its reflection in a tiny dark mirror. | Continue reading
Chemists learned to blow their own glass vessels in the nineteenth century. It definitely beat using wine glasses. | Continue reading
A human hand has the power to split wooden planks and demolish concrete blocks. A trio of physicists investigated why this feat doesn't shatter our bones. | Continue reading
A new book on Darwin’s classic asks what he got right and wrong about “the highest and most interesting problem for the naturalist:” human evolution. | Continue reading
Of early modern medicinal monopolies and the nature of a "true" product of empire. | Continue reading
Tracing an early front in the culture wars to a trio of evangelical opponents of rock music in the 1950s and '60s. | Continue reading
The 1896 version of crime sensationalism also taught the victim-blaming lesson “Stay Sexy, Don’t Get Murdered.” | Continue reading
The British Regency era lasted less than a decade, but it spawned a staggering number of unlikely fictional marriages. | Continue reading
Here's how to figure out how long it's been since someone left their empties around, only to be dug up later. | Continue reading
In the mid-nineteenth century, the law was ambiguous. | Continue reading
The Shanti Project’s work in caring for people with AIDS provides valuable lessons in the efficacy of mutual aid in fighting disease. | Continue reading
Tap into the underground network of plants and fungi with mysterious myco-heterotrophes. | Continue reading
On the persistence of a folk belief. | Continue reading
Elke Mackenzie’s moments of self-citation illuminate the hopes of someone who, against ease and tradition, did not wish to separate her identity from her research. | Continue reading
In 1803, nearly two dozen orphan boys endured long voyages and physical discomfort to transport the smallpox vaccine to Spain's colonies. | Continue reading
The seemingly static appearance of these ancient-looking arthropods presents a challenge for scientists who want to study their evolutionary history. | Continue reading
Election days used to be raucous affairs, with individual votes sometimes cast orally for all to hear. | Continue reading
Some claimed the battles were so fierce they could smell the gunpowder. | Continue reading
Colonial exploitation made the indigenous Aztec people disproportionately vulnerable to epidemics. Indigenous accounts show their perspective. | Continue reading
Three researchers investigate whether bicyclists deserve their negative reputation. | Continue reading
File under: “don’t try this at home.” | Continue reading
As heat waves induced by climate change roil the Arctic Circle, Siberians are articulating a distinct identity. | Continue reading
A study of historical fine-dining menus yields surprises. Like six preparations of frog, and delicious lamb testicles. | Continue reading
Platypuses. They’re weird. In fact, platypuses are so unusual that it took taxonomists more than eighty years just to decide what they are. | Continue reading
In 1932, the “Bonus Army” of jobless veterans staged a protest in Washington, DC. The government dispersed them with tear gas. | Continue reading
After Charles Hatfield began his work to wring water from the skies, San Diego experienced its wettest period in recorded history. | Continue reading
They worked over sixty hours a week but were also insatiable readers. | Continue reading