Jon Entine’s Abraham’s Children: Race, Identity, and the DNA of the Chosen People is a history of Judaism through the lens of what DNA research has produced in the last ten years. While Jewish history is worth studying in its own right, ancestral DNA testing has added to the story Read more…
Aleister Crowley was a dick. I’ve known that for a long time, mind you. I read his “autohagiography” (a hagiography being the biography of a saint) when I was a teenager. He had some interesting magickal ideas, a lot of which is well worth studying if you have an interest Read more…
I’m currently reading Morris Kline’s Mathematics for the Nonmathematician, which was recommended to me by a college professor. It’s not one of those books that I think I’ll fully review, but I had to share this. The early Catholic Church thought of math as evil. To quote St. Augustine, circa Read more…
Once upon a time, physicists put a lot of thought into why physics worked the way it did. Einstein, Bohr, Schrodinger: they all wrote about the philosophy of physics. It wasn’t just about what numbers proved, it was about why they proved it, and what could become of that knowledge. Read more…
The Reform of Time by Maureen Perkins presents an interesting idea: that 18th and 19th century England drove the death of everyday magic by changing the way they saw time. Over that century, Perkins writes, the British came to think of time as a ceaseless march of progress. They started Read more…
I finished a great book last night: The Chemistry of Alchemy, by Cathy Cobb, Monty Fetterolf, and Harold Goldwhite. It’s a history of alchemy, but Cobb et al. aren’t historians. They’re chemists. The chapters on history alternate with alchemical experiments the reader can do at home. Obviously there’s no formula for Read more…
It’s only been in the past 200 years that people in the West married for love. Before that, marriage was for purely practical reasons. “But,” you’re wondering, “didn’t people fall in love?” Sure they did. Just not with their spouses. Adultery used to be normal — at least for men. Read more…
As you know, I’ll read a book on any subject as long as the author makes it interesting. So when I picked up The Footnote: A Curious History by Anthony Grafton, I had hopes. I mean, I once read a book on the history of diagramming sentences, and it was hilarious. Read more…
Oliver Sacks was one of my favorite science writers. (He died a couple of years ago, sadly.) He was a neurologist, best known for the book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. He wrote about things we’d learned about the workings of the mind through people who’d suffered Read more…
I’m a textiles nerd. I spin, I knit, I weave. I love the feeling of being connected with thousands of ancestors. I’ve read a few books on the subject of textile history, of course, but I doubt most of my readers care about the technical stuff. So instead I’m going Read more…