What the World Will Look Like in 250 Million Years: Mapping the Distant Future

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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 of not just the super­con­ti­nent Pangea, but also of the phe­nom­e­non of con­ti­nen­tal drift…

What Was Smoot-Hawley, and Why Are We Doing It Again? Anyone? Anyone?

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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 Irwin (an econ­o­mist and his­to­ri­an at Dart­mouth) revis­its the 1930 Smoot-Haw­ley Tar­iff Act,…

How Chinese Characters Work: The Evolution of a Three-Millennia-Old Writing System

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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 direct­ly onto the remains of tur­tles and oxen, do bear traces of their pic­to­graph ances­tors. But…

Hear the World’s Oldest Known Song, “Hurrian Hymn No. 6” Written 3,400 Years Ago

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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 3400 years old.

Actu­al­ly, you can — a sim­i­lar tablet, which ref­er­ences…

What Is Kafkaesque?: The Philosophy of Franz Kafka

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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 him­self. Born in Prague in 1883, he grew up under a stern, demand­ing, and per­pet­u­al­ly…