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- Meet Jesse Welles, the Folk Singer Who Turns News into Folk Music, Writing Songs on Elections, Plane Crashes, Ozempic & Moreby Colin Marshall on February 14, 2025 at 10:00 am
At first glance, Jesse Welles resembles nothing so much as a time traveler from the year 1968. That’s how I would open a profile about him, but The New York Times’ David Peisner takes a different approach, describing him recording a song in his home studio. “Welles, a singer-songwriter with a shaggy, dirty-blond mane and
- Flannery O’Connor: Friends Don’t Let Friends Read Ayn Randby OC on February 14, 2025 at 9:00 am
In a letter dated May 31, 1960, Flannery O’Connor, the author best known for her classic story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find” (listen to her read the story here) penned a letter to her friend, the playwright Maryat Lee. It begins rather abruptly, likely because it’s responding to something Maryat said in a
- How the Fairlight CMI Synthesizer Revolutionized Musicby Colin Marshall on February 13, 2025 at 10:00 am
In the credits of Phil Collins’ No Jacket Required appears the disclaimer that “there is no Fairlight on this record.” Cryptic though it may have appeared to most of that album’s many buyers, technology-minded musicians would’ve got it. In the half-decades since its introduction, the Fairlight Computer Musical Instrument, or CMI, had reshaped the sound
- Jane Austen Used Pins to Edit Her Manuscripts: Before the Word Processor & White-Outby OC on February 13, 2025 at 6:17 am
Before the word processor, before White-Out, before Post-It Notes, there were straight pins. Or, at least that’s what Jane Austen used to make edits in one of her rare manuscripts. In 2011, Oxford’s Bodleian Library acquired the manuscript of Austen’s abandoned novel, The Watsons. In announcing the acquisition, the Bodleian wrote: The Watsons is Jane Austen’s first
- What It Was Like to Get a Meal at a Medieval Tavernby Colin Marshall on February 12, 2025 at 10:01 am
At least since The Canterbury Tales, the setting of the medieval tavern has held out the promise of adventure. For their customer base during the actual Middle Ages, however, they had more utilitarian virtues. “If you ever find yourself in the late medieval period, and you are in need of food and drink, you’d better
- Watch 10 Great German Expressionist Films: Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari & Moreby OC on February 12, 2025 at 9:00 am
In 1913, Germany, flush with a new nation’s patriotic zeal, looked like it might become the dominant nation of Europe and a real rival to that global superpower Great Britain. Then it hit the buzzsaw of World War I. After the German government collapsed in 1918 from the economic and emotional toll of a half-decade
- Horrifying 1906 Illustrations of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds: Discover the Art of Henrique Alvim Corrêaby OC on February 11, 2025 at 10:00 am
H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds has terrified and fascinated readers and writers for decades since its 1898 publication and has inspired numerous adaptations. The most notorious use of Wells’ book was by Orson Welles, whom the author called “my little namesake,” and whose 1938 War of the Worlds Halloween radio play caused public alarm (though not actually a
- Tracing English Back to Its Oldest Known Ancestor: An Introduction to Proto-Indo-Europeanby Colin Marshall on February 11, 2025 at 9:00 am
People understand evolution in all sorts of different ways. We’ve all heard a variety of folk explanations of that all-important phenomenon, from “survival of the fittest” to “humans come from monkeys,” that run the spectrum from broadly correct to badly mangled. One less often heard but more elegant way to put it is that all
- Neil deGrasse Tyson Explains Who Was the Greatest Scientific Mind in Historyby Colin Marshall on February 10, 2025 at 10:00 am
Neil deGrasse Tyson has spent his career talking up not just science itself, but also its practitioners. If asked to name the greatest scientist of all time, one might expect him to need a minute to think about it — or even to find himself unable to choose. But that’s hardly Tyson’s style, as evidenced
- Hear an AI Chatbot, Masquerading as a Clueless Grandmother, Waste the Time of an Internet Scam Artistby OC on February 10, 2025 at 9:00 am
And now for a good use of AI. The UK-based telecom company O2 has developed a chatbot (“named Daisy”) that performs a noble task. Impersonating an elderly grandmother, the chatbot engages with internet fraudsters and then systematically frustrates them and wastes their time. As part of a demo, notes The Guardian, Daisy wasted a series