The Dutch tulip craze of the 1630’s went far beyond a love of pretty flowers. Tulipomania created a bizarre futures bubble in which some people literally sold their homes and businesses to bet on tulips that hadn’t even bloomed yet. Read more…
I just read a book on sanguivores: animals that drink blood for survival. It was so good. I should warn you, this post gets a little disturbing at times. Okay, maybe all the time. Enjoy. Let’s start with the bats. Read more…
Jon Entine’s Abraham’s Children: Race, Identity, and the DNA of the Chosen People is a history of Judaism through the lens of what DNA research has produced in the last ten years. While Jewish history is worth studying in its Read more…
Aleister Crowley was a dick. I’ve known that for a long time, mind you. I read his “autohagiography” (a hagiography being the biography of a saint) when I was a teenager. He had some interesting magickal ideas, a lot of Read more…
I’m currently reading Morris Kline’s Mathematics for the Nonmathematician, which was recommended to me by a college professor. It’s not one of those books that I think I’ll fully review, but I had to share this. The early Catholic Church Read more…
Once upon a time, physicists put a lot of thought into why physics worked the way it did. Einstein, Bohr, Schrodinger: they all wrote about the philosophy of physics. It wasn’t just about what numbers proved, it was about why Read more…
The Reform of Time by Maureen Perkins presents an interesting idea: that 18th and 19th century England drove the death of everyday magic by changing the way they saw time. Over that century, Perkins writes, the British came to think Read more…
I finished a great book last night: The Chemistry of Alchemy, by Cathy Cobb, Monty Fetterolf, and Harold Goldwhite. It’s a history of alchemy, but Cobb et al. aren’t historians. They’re chemists. The chapters on history alternate with alchemical experiments the Read more…
It’s only been in the past 200 years that people in the West married for love. Before that, marriage was for purely practical reasons. “But,” you’re wondering, “didn’t people fall in love?” Sure they did. Just not with their spouses. Read more…
As you know, I’ll read a book on any subject as long as the author makes it interesting. So when I picked up The Footnote: A Curious History by Anthony Grafton, I had hopes. I mean, I once read a book Read more…