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

‌

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

‌

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

‌

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…

Actor John Lithgow Reads 20 Lessons on Tyranny, Penned by Historian Timothy Snyder

‌

In 2017, his­to­ri­an Tim­o­thy Sny­der wrote the con­cise book On Tyran­ny: Twen­ty Lessons from the Twen­ti­eth Cen­tu­ry, which went on to become a New York Times best­seller. A his­to­ri­an of fas­cism (then at Yale, now at U. Toron­to), Sny­der want­ed to offer Amer­i­cans a use­ful guide for resist­ing the coun­try’s drift towards…

The Medieval Manuscript That Features “Yoda”, Killer Snails, Savage Rabbits & More: Discover The Smithfield Decretals

‌

As much as you may enjoy a night in with a book, you might not look so eager­ly for­ward to it if that book com­prised 314 folios of 1,971 papal let­ters and oth­er doc­u­ments relat­ing to eccle­si­as­ti­cal law, all from the thir­teenth cen­tu­ry. Indeed, even many spe­cial­ists in the field would hes­i­tate to…