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
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
I was just looking through my collection of quotes (I read a lot of ebooks, and highlight/annotate them like crazy) and thought I would share my favorite psychological paradigm: existential analysis. I get to ramble about something I love, and you get to learn something most people outside of psychology Read more
People who romanticize the past annoy me. Because, frankly, the past was smelly and dirty and kind of awful. Yes, I hear some of you say. Of course it was. But do you have any idea exactly how filthy things were? (Disclaimer: when I say “women” in this post, I Read more
A friend suggested I start blogging about things I’ve read. I read a lot of weird non-fiction, mostly histories and science texts. I’ve read histories of milk, the periodic table, the American highway system, and hundreds more. Standard political and military histories bore me, but the strange subjects always grab Read more