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Belling the Cat

Medieval fable attributed to Aesop Gustave Doré's illustration of La Fontaine's fable, c. 1868 Belling the Cat is a fable also known under the titles The Bell and the Cat and The Mice in Council. In the story, a group of mice agree to attach a bell to a cat's neck to warn of its approach in the future, but they fail to find a volunteer to perform the job. The term has become an idiom describing a group of persons, each agreeing to perform an impossibly difficult task under the misapprehension

The Middle Earth

One of the most engaging books I have read this year is A Little Learning: A Victorian Childhood, by the novelist Winifred Peck (1882-1962). Looking back from the 1950s, Peck describes her education at a number of different schools in the last decades of the 19th century – a time when the opportunities available to women, and ideas about how girls should be educated, were changing very rapidly. Though she came from a scholarly and successful family (her father was a bishop), Peck’s chequered ed

Why did books start being divided into chapters? A new history

Perhaps it is the inevitable fate of any convention, but literary history does not, it turns out, have many examples of people appreciating great chaptering. In The History of English Prose Rhythm (1912) – one of the sources for James Joyce’s virtuosic-or-unreadable parodies of the evolution of English prose in Ulysses – George Saintsbury remarks on Thomas Malory’s decision to insert a chapter break at a decisive moment in his fifteenth-century Morte d’Arthur. At the end of chapter ten of the Mo

How to Build a Medieval Castle

Sometimes it takes a village to raise a window. Between 2015 and 2017, skilled masons meticulously carved and beveled arches and four-lobed flourishes for a Gothic-style stone window frame in Guédelon Castle’s ornate Chapel Tower. All that remained was to install some glass. But there was a problem, and the carpenters, painters, blacksmiths, basket weavers, historians, and archaeologists who work on-site were all enlisted to figure it out. Eight years later, the matter of what to put in the wind

1910: The year the modern world lost its mind

“Automobilism is an illness, a mental illness. This illness has a pretty name: speed... [Man] can no longer stand still, he shivers, his nerves tense like springs, impatient to get going once he has arrived somewhere because it is not somewhere else, somewhere else, always somewhere else.” - Octave Mirbeau, French novelist, 1910 About today’s piece: When we hear about technological change and social crisis in the 21st century, it is easy to imagine that we are living through a special period of

What if AI made the world’s economic growth explode?

U NTIL 1700 the world economy did not really grow—it just stagnated. Over the previous 17 centuries global output had expanded by 0.1% a year on average, a rate at which it takes nearly a millennium for production to double. Then spinning jennies started whirring and steam engines began to puff. Global growth quintupled to 0.5% a year between 1700 and 1820. By the end of the 19th century it had reached 1.9%. In the 20th century it averaged 2.8%, a rate at which production doubles every 25 years.

LA’s Museum of Jurassic Technology damaged by fire

One of the quirkier cultural gems in Los Angeles is the Museum of Jurassic Technology (MJT), featuring an eclectic collection of exhibits (of varying authenticity) inspired by historical Renaissance "cabinets of curiosities" (wunderkammers). It hasn't been broadly reported, but earlier this month, a fire broke out late at night, gutting the museum's gift shop and inflicting smoke damage on several exhibits, with lost revenues estimated to be around $75,000 until the doors reopen sometime next mo

Stone blocks from the Lighthouse of Alexandria recovered from seafloor

After centuries underwater, 22 huge stone blocks of the ancient Lighthouse of Alexandria, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, have been recovered from the Mediterranean seabed, a breakthrough in an ambitious digital reconstruction effort. Restoration is part of the ongoing “PHAROS” project, led by archaeologist and architect Isabelle Hairy of France’s National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), along with Egypt’s Centre d’Études Alexandrines (CEAlex) under the authority of Egypt’

Off with Their Heads: Illustrations of Blemmyes (ca. 1175–1724)

No matter that a headless tribe of people never existed, their inclusion in ancient histories made them popular fodder for later bestiary and travelogue traditions. Beginning with their appearance in the late-tenth century Marvels of the East, the Blemmyes often look just as confused as we are — staring out at the viewer, as if trying to understand where, exactly, their neck went wrong. In these illustrations, Blemmyes frequently keep equally strange bedfellows. The thirteenth-century Rutland Ps