https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1-WuBbVe2E In an old Zen story, two monks argue over whether a flag is waving or whether it’s the wind that waves. Their teacher strikes them both dumb, saying, “It is your mind that moves.” The centuries-old koan illustrates a...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FbKd9tHTAQ The Lord said to Noah, there’s going to be a floody, floody; then to get those children out of the muddy, muddy; then to build him an arky, arky. This much we heard while toasting marshmallows around the campfire,...
Images via Wikimedia Commons In the mid-20th century, the two big dogs in the American literary scene were William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. Both were internationally revered, both were masters of the novel and the short story, and both won...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nlzehe4mta4 Most of us now accept the idea that all of Earth’s continents were once part of a single, enormous land mass. That wasn’t the case in the early nineteen-tens, when the geologist Alfred Wegener (1880–1930) first publicized his theory...
When most Americans think of the Smoot-Hawley Tariffs, they think of economic disaster. But if you ask why, most Americans may need a short refresher course. Below, you will find just that. Appearing on Derek Thompson’s Plain History podcast, Douglas...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KElPnD-dbkk 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...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0EySK4T2aY 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...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaffA9EyUgo 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...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXR5HLodsT8 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...
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...
