The world was supposed to end yesterday, and didn’t. A viral TikTok anxiety trend (aka #rapturetok), this latest Rapture non-starter was predicted by Joshua Mhlakela of South Africa, who, in…

A "living picture" film staging Botticelli’s Birth of Venus with a twist. Source link

Expedition accounts of aeronauts bravely venturing into the heavens on hot-air balloons. Source link

Book II tells of René’s travels in “places that were less perfidious and less dangerous” (Northern Italy, Austria, and Upper Hungary). Like Montesquieu in Persian Letters (1721), Bajza uses the…

Still, he admits, it is true that prominent men have prominent noses — everyone since Aristotle has agreed about that. An aquiline nose, we learn, is a necessary component of…

Born in 1779, Schouten was the son of Hendrik Schouten, a Dutch administrator and littérateur, and Suzanna Hansen, a free woman of color who belonged to a prosperous and, at…

Long before “earthing mats” became a pseudoscientific health trend and Japanese “cedar enzyme baths” went viral, James Graham (1745–94) encouraged his readers to bury themselves alive in the name of…

Mayer patiently introduces children to many of the cutting-edge principles and theories of sound that were circulating in the late nineteenth century, covering topics such as reflection, transmission, vibration, and…

And so, Laura becomes “Aunt Lolly”, a caretaker for the younger children, accompanying them on seaside holidays, even though she’d rather “go by herself for long walks inland and find…