Oliver Sacks was one of my favorite science writers. (He died a couple of years ago, sadly.) He was a neurologist, best known for the book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. He wrote about things we’d learned about the workings of the mind through people who’d suffered Read more…
I’m a textiles nerd. I spin, I knit, I weave. I love the feeling of being connected with thousands of ancestors. I’ve read a few books on the subject of textile history, of course, but I doubt most of my readers care about the technical stuff. So instead I’m going Read more…
When you go to a retail shop, especially a chain store, everything you experience is planned from the moment you walk in. Fortune 500 retailers have actually hired people to follow shoppers around and watch what they do. Here’s a few things you don’t think about. — Store temperature. Dressing Read more…
I spent this week sick with a cold, so my reading has been limited to absolute fluff with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. I’m feeling a little better today, though, so I’m skimming through a couple of books I’ve read already on a subject y’all might find interesting. Stay tuned!
Sleep is weird. We spend about a third of our lives asleep. Gerbils and lions do it 13 hours a day. Elephants average only 3.5 hours. Birds and dolphins only sleep with half their brain at a time, so they can still fly and surface for air. Obviously it’s important, Read more…
Subtitle: Why You Should Always Get Your Flu Shot In the year 1918, the entire world caught influenza. It was a particularly virulent strain, and thanks to troop movements in WWI it became the first recorded global pandemic. A lot of people died. And it wasn’t just children or the Read more…
The short version: from colonial times until the mid-1800’s, white America was drunk. Really drunk. Like, most of the time, especially the men. But even the women and children made our modern-day party animals look like lightweights in comparison. The longer version: Rum, gin, and brandy were thought medicinal. And Read more…
This is the first book I’ve read specifically for this blog. Being a milestone, I wanted it to be a good one, a perfect example of how the books I read sound dull at first but are fascinating and involve world-changing events. So I chose a book about the color Read more…
Let’s talk about death. Humans have done lots of odd things to human remains. The Catholic church in the Middle Ages did some spectacularly morbid things with the skeletons of the diseased, creating whole death cults, bizarre works of art, and ghoulish business practices. In the late Middle Ages, the veneration Read more…
In the days of traveling by horse and sailing ships, it could take months to get a message to someone. You’d send a letter, and it may or may not arrive due to bandits and shipwrecks and other perils, and if it did arrive then whatever had been fresh information was Read more…