May 10, 2025
July 29, 2015
Writing began in the marketplace, with the scribbling of merchants in the Greek agora. From there it became the translator of songs, of Homer’s epic tales and Hesiod’s tales of the muses. But it would take a thousand years and a leap across a continent to the medieval scriptorium of Anglo-Saxon monks before writing would be shaped, standardized, copied, and recopied, into what we know understand to be literature.
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July 24, 2015
The Fountain of Youth, a literary Russian adventure, and the sin of ice cream.
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July 17, 2015
Segregating the sexes through architecture, fast food in ancient Rome, and the twilight of Queen Elizabeth’s corgis.
Read MoreJuly 16, 2015
In the 1960s, affluent American volunteers lined up to serve the neediest abroad. But the radical Catholic priest Ivan Illich urged them to reconsider their missionary zeal—“you will not help anybody by your good intentions.”
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July 10, 2015
An Ancient Greek play gets new life, reconstructing Noah’s Ark, and the origins of the ticker-tape parade.
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July 02, 2015
Confederate bedtime stories, all-American coffee, and a pair of royal underpants.
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June 30, 2015
As J.P. Morgan’s personal librarian, Belle da Costa Greene uncovered the Victorian forger who flooded the market with fake medieval art.
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June 26, 2015
Using leeches to cure what ails you, endangered historic sites, and a 1941 beard-off.
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June 19, 2015
A trash-culture icon, Napoleonic cosplay, and what, exactly, is euchre?
Read More2023:
Fitness instructor carves his girlfriend’s name into the Colosseum.
c. 1850:
Thompson of Sunderland makes his mark on Pompey’s pillar.
2023:
Writers on strike search for romance at the picket line.
c. 1945:
Young communists engage in party matchmaking.