Encounters with Medieval Women is a four episode series of the London Review of Books podcast where scholars Irina Dumitrescu and Mary Wellesley discuss four medieval texts by or about women: St. Mary of Egypt, Julian of Norwich, the Wife of Bath, and …
France is a monarchy that undergoes a succession crisis every five years
La Campagne is a newsletter about the upcoming French presidential election by French economist Manu Saadia (best known for his book Trekonomics). He was fed up with the inaccuracies of English language coverage of French politics, and decided to remed…
“Garum has long been considered the dodo of gastronomic history.”
Culinary Detectives Try to Recover the Formula for a Deliciously Fishy Roman Condiment is an article by Taras Grescoe about recent attempts to recreate the Roman Empire’s most beloved sauce, garum (previouslies on MeFi). In Spain and Portugal, you can …
“mere ripples on the surface of the great sea of life”
The point is that longtermism might be one of the most influential ideologies that few people outside of elite universities and Silicon Valley have ever heard about. I believe this needs to change because, as a former longtermist who published an entir…
The 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature goes to Abdulrazak Gurnah
Abdulrazak Gurnah is a novelist from Zanzibar who lives in Brighton, England. He is best known for his novel Paradise, but has published several novels. Anders Olsson, chairman of the Swedish Academy’s Nobel committee has written an essay about Gurnah,…
“the alchemy of total opposites”
Soprano Jóna G. Kolbrúnardóttir sings Jóhann Jóhannsson’s “Odi et Amo” from the album Englabörn, accompanied by the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra. Usually when the piece is performed, the Latin poem by Catullus is sung by a computer and played off a tap…
“places where Real Life unfolded”
Anthony Veasna So explored what it was like to grow up as a queer son of Khmer refugees in Stockton, California. Last year he died suddenly at the age of 28, just after correcting the proofs of his debut story collection, Afterparties. Four of the nine…
“archival practices have not changed much in over 4,000 years”
Ebla, the Official Site of the Italian Archaeological Mission in Syria gives details about the excavation of Ebla, the capital of a bronze age empire in what is now northern Syria which flourished in the third millennium BCE. Archaeologist Paolo Matthi…
“overlapping Earths along whose linking axis a person can somehow move”
In 1977 at a science fiction convention in Metz, France, Philip K. Dick delivered a lecture about his concept of orthogonal time titled “If You Find This World Bad You Should See Some of the Others”. The audience was described as leaving the auditorium…
Ursula K. Le Guin’s blog archive is back online
“In 2010, at the age of 81, Ursula started a blog. 2017’s No Time to Spare collected a selection of her posts into a book, and for a time, those posts were unavailable online. They’ve now been restored.” Here’s Le Guin’s introductory post. [via]