St Patrick’s Day is celebrated in more countries than any other national festival! The largest parade on earth takes place in New York City and two million people turn out to watch it. All of which…

This photograph of my great grandfather William Lucas Hankins was likely taken about 1893-1894 in Auburn, Cayuga County, New York. City directories indicate that he moved to Auburn sometime between…

With Passover fast approaching, I've been putting AI to use in my Seder prep. Specifically, I've been using it to discover and unpack different topics of conversation I could explore with my guests.…

This morning, as I was sipping my coffee and nodding along to a BetterOffline podcast on how LLMs are breaking big tech , I checked my inbox to see if I heard back from any of the tech companies I…

W hile it appears to be a normal family portrait, this snapshot was taken just days before Charlie Lawson (the man standing second from the right) murdered everyone pictured here on Christmas Day…

Is the past such a bad place to hang out, to gain inspiration from?It worked for the Renaissance. When Marsilio Ficino translated the Corpus Hermeticum into Latin it kickstarted the…

The Distaff Texts — 17 min read

Five Books, an interesting site which brings you notice of the five best books on this, that and the other, here offers you access to the five oldest books. Just the other day some other knowledgable…

Is your desire for that person really from God? Or are you being tempted by Satan with someone the Lord does not want for you? It can be hard to know when romantic feelings are involved.  However,…

In this episode of The Creative Mind & Mortality—Season 1: Glass Bones, Episode 5, Why Awareness Alone Wasn’t Enough, I open Chapter Two with the song “Walking in Your Footsteps” by The Police, a…

Andy Warhol, Heart (1979). The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. “Writers, poets, musicians, filmmakers—painters too, even chance readers—may find that they are Spinozists; indeed, such a…

Figure 0: Robert Adams. Colorado Springs. 1968, gelatin silver print, 14.8 x 15.1 cm 1. Introduction What is stronger, pleasure or pain? Edmund Burke (1729-1797) would argue the latter, claiming that…

There is no purpose to the Universe. That's why you have to find it yourself, and for yourself, even if you are an Atheist.

Branch Rickey in his playing days. <span style="

I&#x2019;ve had an interest in translating poetry for as long as I can remember. As an undergraduate, I was awarded the B&#x2019;nai Zion medal for excellence in Hebrew, largely on the basis of an…

This week, we at My Poetic Side take a look at the acquisition of Wordsworth’s Final home, and the shortlists for the Moth and Thomas Prizes. Wordsworth’s Final Home in the Lake District Acquired by…

A quiet patch of ruins in southern Türkiye has revealed an unexpected layer of history. At the ancient city of Sillyon, archaeologists have identified the remains of an Ottoman-era village square,…

Started on: Dec 16th, 2025 Finished on: Mar 18th, 2025 Time to read: 39 hours, 54 minutes Also published on Goodreads &ldquo;Medieval&rdquo; and &ldquo;Dark ages&rdquo; has become two faces of the…

Tracing the evolution of the metaphor 'paper tiger' from late Yuan and early Ming novels to modern political discourse. It did not originate from Mao's Selected Works, but the term 'paper tiger'…

lingthusiasm:Lingthusiasm Episode 114: Begonia, average coral, and sea pink - Defining colour terms with Kory Stamperbegonia: a deep pink that is bluer, lighter, and stronger than average coral (see…

Asked in 2025 whether he had a duty to uphold the U.S. Constitution Trump said, 'I don't know.' &gt;&gt;&gt; Jill Lepore, We the People This book was a birthday present from our website founder,...

From fewer than 10 names to 168 individuals, 19+ family lines, and 300+ years of sourced history.

On compare la conception de la raison dans l’œuvre de Rousseau avec la notion de la conscience et son origine.

A Re-examination of “Stereotypes.”

I concluded the last installment&nbsp;in this series with a deceptively simple claim: Things exist.&nbsp; This two-word quip is a scientific hypothesis, an explanation for some of my subjective…

I grew up going to a little 13th century church in Bushey. There was a lot of talking and listening. I enjoyed listening to testimonies the most: ordinary people talking about how Christian ideas had…

Got a chance to visit Göttingen for a talk. Observatory and workplace of Carl Friedrich Gauß.

By Rich BittermanThere are seasons when life feels darker and heavier than we expected.“Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your…

Sprezzatura. Say it out loud. Spreh-za-TOO-rah . Let it sit in your mouth for a second. Sounds like something you'd want to eat, or drink, or steal. By the time you get to that last syllable your…

dogwithglasses:Sometimes I wonder about the nonhumans who say they don’t want to be called a person. Imo “person” does not imply humanness except to anthropocentrics who can’t see things other than…

The other day I asserted the absolute right of a publisher to refuse, at any point during the process, to publish any particular book. Jane Austen (1775-1817) experienced this at first hand. Her…

How will you really know when a woman was sent to you by God? After all, plenty of guys thought a woman was from the Lord, only to find out she was a terrible match for him. Also, as we all know,…

Falling from Grace: Part 3, High-Handed Sin: Calvinism has never been immune from anxiety, given how you worry about if you are, indeed, one of the elect. Sure, when you see a fellow believer…

What happens when programmes interpret programmes? As decision-making becomes increasingly mediated by computational procedures, interactions between programmes themselves come into view as a…

In President Trump's eyes the British Prime Minister 'is no Winston Churchill'. But is that such a bad thing?

I grew up believing I knew what the book of Revelation was about. It was about the future, specifically our future, and if you paid close enough attention you could match its symbols to newspaper…

So far as I know, there are no Catholic nuns in my family tree or my husband's family tree. But if I did have a female ancestor who became a nun, I would absolutely buy this book in a heartbeat.…

The date of Easter Sunday, the great Christian festival celebrating the resurrection of Jesus, is determined by an amalgam of astronomy, mathematics and pragmatism, an algorithm that determines the…

One for Cottonpolis Some of Manchester’s commercial buildings are so vast that they defeat the photographic efforts of a mere amateur with an iPhone. You really need skill and a camera with a good…

Traditional STEM education trains students to flatten complex problems so they can solve them. Humanities training, on the other hand, helps them perceive the full dimensions of the problems they are…

The other week I read William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity (first published 1930, third edition 1953 with new footnotes by the author). Empson purports to taxonomize all sorts of “ambiguity,”…

Rating: 🟩🟩 Type: Non-Fiction

I recently read the revised edition of Stanley Lombardo’s translation of the Phaenomena of Aratus (titled The Sky Is Our Song: The “Phaenomena” of Aratus) and thoroughly enjoyed it. This edition is…

I was thinking the other day about the fact that when I write poems I write them in English, even though this language is not my mother tongue. Then I though of some other "semantic fields" of my…

A rare Renaissance portrait of Mehmed II—the Ottoman ruler who reshaped the course of world history—will soon take center stage at a high-profile auction in Dubai. Created in 1481 by the Italian…

Orginal post: 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks Hermann Anton Leferink , printer, son of Gerhard and Johanna Henrica (Stücker) Leferink, was born in Gronau (Westf.) 29 May 1906 1 and went missing-in-action…

It’s been a long time since I have done a post about an “older icon,” an older woman who changed ideas about how to dress during a crucial time period. Not much remembered today, Mamie Eisenhower was…

Nestled amongst the skyscrapers and ceaseless energy of the City of London, the nation&#8217;s financial heart, lies a small pocket of stillness, steeped in history. On the corner of Seething Lane…

My favorite Anarchist youtuber Andrewism dropped this video a couple of days ago. It was a great video that I recommend you watch, talking about subjects such as Animism, how states relied on and…