You can learn a lot about a society by its taboos. Surprisingly, Britain and her former colonies still have a lot of the same social mores as the English during the Elizabethan period. From the disgust at open-mouthed chewing, to many people’s horror at frank discussions of menstruation, there’s a Read more…
I originally wrote this up on the Facebook “Tarot Nerds” group, and someone wanted to share it elsewhere. Instead of joining other groups just to post it, I thought I’d put it here and expand it a little. Even if you’re not interested in tarot, it’s a very brief summary Read more…
The Dutch tulip craze of the 1630’s went far beyond a love of pretty flowers. Tulipomania created a bizarre futures bubble in which some people literally sold their homes and businesses to bet on tulips that hadn’t even bloomed yet. When the bubble burst, fortunes were lost. Domesticated tulips, originally Read more…
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…
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…