On a good day, my bongo score looks like this: Compared to all the people who have played this morning, it’s right at the top. That could be great… Except I’m not being compared to every player in the world. The first graph is built to compare every player who has never
In 2002, the retired British submarine lieutenant-commander turned amateur historian Gavin Menzies created a stir with a book about Chinese seafaring in the fifteenth century. 1421: The Year China Discovered the World (tellingly titled 1421: The Year China Discovered America in
There’s ahead of its time, then there’s Traité des couleurs servant à la peinture à l’eau — or, in its original Dutch title, Klaer Lightende Spiegel der Verfkonst, a 900-page book of paint colors made before any such things were common tools of the artist’s, scientist’s, and
Our language betrays our self-betrayals: We speak of finding love, as if it were an undiscovered eighth continent or a habitable world in another solar system, as if it got lost like the Little Red Riding Hood or the names of the women who painted the caves. Like the
This essay is adapted from Traversal. “Death may snatch me from you, before you can weigh my advice,” Mary Wollstonecraft wrote in the philosophical novel she wouldn’t live to finish, addressing a daughter she was yet to have. “Always appear what you are, and you will not pass