Before I depart this world, I would like to visit St. Giles’ Cathedral in Edinburgh, Scotland, and see the Jenny Geddes memorial. I’m told it’s open to the public. Why? What’s interesting about a stool? Well, it’s probably impossible to point to a single moment, or a single object, and say “The Enlightenment began here.”. […]
history
Celebrating the scientific and technical contributions of Rome on the mythical birthday of the eternal city
The post Rome Was Built Today appeared first on Nautilus.
How the archival work of librarians and other activists helps preserve more than just history.
One theme connecting the essays is “enchantment” and its flight from societies such as our own. Modernity has given us countless things we would not want to be without, but its instrumental approach to nature and contempt for more established cultures has left us in many ways spiritually naked.
The racist origin story of the most common college entrance exam
The post The Creator of the SAT Was an Infamous Eugenicist appeared first on Nautilus.
How samba schools in Brazil are teaching Black history through the parades at Carnival.
Unlearned historical lessons from Jacques-Louis David’s retrospective at the Louvre.
Third and last part of an article discussing Imperia, the large concrete statue of a semi-fictional medieval sex worker. Part 1 is here and Part 2 is here. A Clandestine Erection Imperia went up in April 1993, and I won’t even try to explain the insane backstory. Short version: some people in Constance wanted a […]
12th of March 2026 The vexed question of the place of politics in sport has surfaced yet again at the Winter Olympics in Milan. The Ukrainian skeleton skier Vladyslav Heraskevych wanted to wear a “helmet of remembrance” displaying the names of 24 fellow athletes killed during the Russian invasion of his country. The International Olympic … Continue reading More Sport, Less War by Robert Skidelsky. Published in The American Conservative.
THERE WAS A popular gotcha back in the day for which tech utopians showed a special fondness. In the late 2000s and early 2010s, with conservative critics still noisily alarmed at the internet and social media, proselytisers for the new technology would dip back into history and unearth some comparable commentator whose own example was comically self-defeating.