https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znwUCNrjpD4 You can be forgiven for thinking the concept of “flow” was cooked up and popularized by yoga teachers. That word gets a lot of play when one is moving from Downward-Facing Dog on through Warrior One and Two. Actually,...
The Austrian military engineer Conrad Haas was a man ahead of his time — indeed, about 400 years ahead, considering that he was working on rockets aimed for outer space back in the mid-sixteenth century. Needless to say, he never...
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...
