Contrary to somewhat popular belief, Chinese characters aren’t just little pictures. In fact, most of them aren’t pictures at all. The very oldest, whose evolution can be traced back to the “oracle bone” script of thirteenth century BC etched directly onto the remains of turtles and oxen, do bear traces of their pictograph ancestors. But […]

Do you like old timey music? Splendid. You can’t get more old timey than Hurrian Hymn No. 6, which was discovered on a clay tablet in the ancient Syrian port city of Ugarit in the 1950s, and is over 3400 years old. Actually, you can — a similar tablet, which references a hymn glorifying Lipit-Ishtar, […]

It’s difficult to imagine that there was ever a time without the word “Kafkaesque.” Yet the term would have meant nothing at all to anyone alive at the same time as Franz Kafka — including, in all probability, Kafka himself. Born in Prague in 1883, he grew up under a stern, demanding, and perpetually disappointed […]

In 2017, historian Timothy Snyder wrote the concise book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, which went on to become a New York Times bestseller. A historian of fascism (then at Yale, now at U. Toronto), Snyder wanted to offer Americans a useful guide for resisting the country’s drift towards authoritarianism. It was […]

As much as you may enjoy a night in with a book, you might not look so eagerly forward to it if that book comprised 314 folios of 1,971 papal letters and other documents relating to ecclesiastical law, all from the thirteenth century. Indeed, even many specialists in the field would hesitate to take on […]