CULTURE

Image by Charles Sharp, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons The com­pelling but less-than-straight­for­ward ques­tion of how the ancient Egyp­tians built the pyra­mids has inspired all man­ner of the­o­ry and spec­u­la­tion, ground­ed to vary­ing degrees in phys­i­cal real­i­ty. Sheer man­pow­er must have played...

In 2013, the Oxford Dic­tio­nar­ies announced that “self­ie” had been deemed their Word of The Year. The term, whose first record­ed use as an Insta­gram hash­tag occurred on Jan­u­ary 27, 2011, was actu­al­ly invent­ed in 2002, when an Aus­tralian chap...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaIx0KMOg5I At this time of the year, the Swedish island of Got­land puts on Medeltidsveck­an, or “Medieval Week,” the coun­try’s largest his­tor­i­cal fes­ti­val. Accord­ing to its offi­cial About page, it offers its vis­i­tors the chance to “watch knights on horse­back,...

Due to differences in school systems between Ukraine and Austria, Ukrainian adolescents often enter university earlier than Austrian students. This episode of the Knowledgeable Youth podcast discusses the variations in higher education. The students’ conversation centres around Agata Zysiak’s article...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sU4W36_5oiM Any­one who’s fol­lowed the late Michael Apt­ed’s Up doc­u­men­taries knows that becom­ing a Lon­don cab dri­ver is no mean feat. Tony Walk­er, one of the series’ most mem­o­rable par­tic­i­pants, was select­ed at the age of sev­en from an East...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnItIQSwfSw If you were to come across an Olivet­ti Pro­gram­ma 101, you prob­a­bly would­n’t rec­og­nize it as a com­put­er. With its 36 keys and its paper-strip print­er, it might strike you as some kind of over­sized adding machine, albeit an...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5ih1IRIRxI Ernest Hemingway’s roman­tic adven­ture of man and mar­lin, The Old Man and the Sea, has per­haps spent more time on high school fresh­man Eng­lish read­ing lists than any oth­er work of fic­tion, which might lead one to think of...

At first, everyone contrasted the outspoken freedom of Ukraine’s media with Russia’s blank censorship. Two years on, the gap doesn’t look that tremendous.  It has even shifted since I began researching Ukrainian media legislation at the University of Glasgow in...

ChatGPT and generative AI truly burst onto the scene in late 2022. There’s a good chance that the intersection between books, publishing and AI first crossed your radar sometime in 2023, quite possibly after The Atlantic’s investigation revealed hundreds of...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUxFzh8r384 Tak­ing a first glance at the Baby­lon­ian Map of the World, few of us could rec­og­nize it for what it is. But then again, few of us are any­thing like the British Muse­um Mid­dle East depart­ment cura­tor Irv­ing Finkel,...