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A Literary Map of the United States

From Big Think and Pop Charts, A Literary Map of America that “highlights the real and imagined settings of hundreds of books”. Frank Jacobs takes a closer look at some of the imaginary places on the map , including Sleepy Hollow, Lake Wobegon, Brokeback Mountain, and F. Scott

The Surma Boys of Afghanistan

Afghan-American visual artist Daniel Malikyar recently shared some great photos of what he calls “a fashion subculture unlike anything I’ve encountered before” that he found in a remote village in the mountains of Afghanistan. I met a group of boys in a remote village who

Sicily and the Family Tree of Citrus

On his site Notes From the Road, Erik Gauger has a wonderful eight-part series on The Citrus Kingdom , a collection of illustrated stories about citrus fruit and Sicily. The key to the citron’s future—a future that links nearly every aspect of Sicily’s cultural, political and

Fugitive imagination

Wherever people are confined, displaced, silenced or made disposable, fugitive forms of knowledge and imagination emerge - by Shahram Khosravi Read on Aeon

Ten minutes a day

You can’t become fluent in a foreign language in ten minutes a day, even if you try for months. On the other hand, here are a dozen things many of us can do (or do better) if we stick with it: Three-ball jugglingTouch typingRubik’s CubeDrawingMental mathMemorizing a deck of

When Animals Were Put on Trial in Medieval Europe

Most of us twenty-first-century urbanites have a fairly sentimental view of farm animals, precisely because so many generations have gone by since they’ve been part of our daily lives. (In South Korea, where I live, the agricultural past remains just within living memory.