Month: June 2019

The European Middle Ages lasted a thousand years, running roughly from AD 500 to AD 1500. A lot of history took place during this time, but textbooks often fail to reconnect the living with the past as much as artifacts do. Some items prove that certain things never change—people cheated at games, carried deadly weapons,
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Fashion has changed quite a bit from our hunter-gatherer days, when the most fashionable thing someone could wear was anything at all. What we wear now has less to do with adapting to the environment and more with self-expression and what everyone else is wearing. Modern fashion has been a long time in the making,
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The 19th and 20th centuries were a period of unprecedented change in human history. In 1807, the Napoleonic Wars were raging; in 2007, smartphones were becoming a thing. No other era in human history comes close to matching this rate of change. And in no other place was this change faster than in Europe. As
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It’s an oft-repeated notion: Everything on Earth has already been explored and how awesome it would have been if we had been born in the Age of Exploration. In a consistently shrinking world due to technology and advanced research tools, that does seem to be true. After all, why would we be thinking about going
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There are countless reports of compassionate mailmen who have gone above and beyond the call of duty, helping residents in their time of need. Be it a kind gesture, a listening ear, or saving someone’s life while on the job, such stories echo the essence of what it means to be a good person. The
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Some modern technologies were invented to work or look one way but ended up getting modified. At other times, they were invented for particular purposes but were ultimately used in different ways. This is true for several of today’s technologies—from our phones to USBs, air conditioners, sirens, and blockchains, which form the backbone of cryptocurrencies
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Ask any kid in almost any country, and they’ll tell you who Big Bird is. But how well do we really know our feathered friend? On the surface, he’s a lovable character from Sesame Street who stands 249 centimeters tall (8’2″)[1] and sports orange feet the size of snowshoes. But there are many sides to
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With the recent release of the series Tidying Up with Marie Kondo on Netflix, there was a tinge of backlash regarding her comments about holding onto too many books. She recommends only having 30 at a time. Of course, memes appeared overnight defending book-hoarding with a stunning ferocity. This compulsive craving to collect and hoard
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For millions of people throughout the world, the university dormitory is an integral part of the higher education experience. Some have fond memories of their dorm rooms; others think of their dorms as one step above a prison cell. Either way, nobody can doubt that “interesting” things tend to happen in dorm rooms. Here, in
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Roughly 150,000 men of Jewish descent fought in Hitler’s army. While their families back home were being corralled into ghettos and sent off to death camps, these men were in Poland, France, or Russia, spreading the fascist system that was killing their people across Europe. It’s hard to understand, but many Jewish Germans signed up
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Lakes are liminal spaces. The world divides between what is above and what is below. They can also be spooky places where waves behave oddly, and it is easy to imagine all manner of things concealed in the gloomy depths below. While lakes may scare some people away, others actively go to them to search
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