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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 Read more…