A 600-year-old manuscript—written in a script no one has ever decoded, filled with cryptic illustrations, its origins remaining to this day a mystery…. It’s not as satisfying a plot, say, of a National Treasure or Dan Brown thriller, certainly not as action-packed as pick-your-Indiana Jones…. The Voynich Manuscript, named for the antiquarian who rediscovered it […]

Several generations of American students have now had the experience of being told by an English teacher that they’d been reading Robert Frost all wrong, even if they’d never read him at all. Most, at least, had seen his lines “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— / I took the one less traveled […]

Image via Wikimedia Commons In 590 AD, Pope Gregory I unveiled a list of the Seven Deadly Sins – lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride – as a way to keep the flock from straying into the thorny fields of ungodliness. These days, though, for all but the most devout, Pope Gregory’s list […]

Frank Lloyd Wright is unlikely to be displaced as the archetype of the genius architect anytime soon, at least in America, but even he had to start somewhere. At nine years old, as architecture YouTuber Stewart Hicks explains in the video above, Wright received a set of blocks from his mother, who hoped that “her […]

Even if you don’t speak Italian, you can make a decent guess at the meaning of the word mangiamaccheroni. The tricky bit is that maccheroni refers not to the pasta English-speakers today call macaroni, tubular and cut into small curved sections, but to pasta in general. Or at least it did around the turn of […]