“Looking back, what I had actually done is uncover evidence of the video’s supposed legacy, rather than evidence of the inciting incident. I assumed that because multiple people independently told me the same thing, that thing was true.”
“Looking back, what I had actually done is uncover evidence of the video’s supposed legacy, rather than evidence of the inciting incident. I assumed that because multiple people independently told me the same thing, that thing was true.”
“Both stars of the video had been telling opposite sides of the same funny anecdote for more than 25 years, unaware of who to thank for their respective brushes with fame.”
“But the syphilis story stuck. Even as newspapers trumpeted particulars of Graham’s passing (and there were many), her cause of death, like so many details about women in her line of work, never seemed to be worth investigating.”
“The original silphion was said to have appeared suddenly, after a great downpour. Miski observed that, when rains came to Cappadocia in April, Ferula drudeana would spring from the ground, growing up to six feet in just over a month.”
“But individuals also have real agency, and our actions determine the actual consequences of these Great Forces as they reshape our world. We have to understand both, and study both, and act on the world now remembering that both are real.”
“So when Hild is called hægtes, she is being labelled uncanny, powerful, fearsome, and dangerous — but also perhaps necessary to a group’s survival, even admirable, and most definitely to be paid attention to — not for her femininity but for her otherworldly power.”
“[I]t turned out that the strain of plague that ravaged northern Kyrgyzstan in 1338–1339 was an ancestor of every other 14th-century plague genome that has ever been sequenced. The plague strain from the Lake Issyk-Kul villages also seems to be the most recent common ancestor of four Y. pestis lineages that circulate in modern rodent populations.”
“My assessment … suggests that the blues has very old roots, originating with performers who found new ways of playing African-inflected music in the New World — but typically in rural areas where they could remain immune to many of the influences linked to commercial trends in American music.”
“‘If the Black Death caused the Renaissance will the COVID pandemic cause a golden age?’ You see the problems with the question now: the Black Death didn’t cause the Renaissance, not by itself, and the Renaissance was not a golden age, at least not the kind that you would want to live in, or to see your children live in.”
“[A] central theme of this story is that expectations move slower than reality on the ground. That was true when people clung to 1950s expectations as the economy changed over the next 35 years. And even if a middle-class boom began today, expectations that the odds are stacked against everyone but those at the top may stick around.”
(This is interesting and insightful, but I link to it with a very large caveat: It erases minorities from the story.)
“Searle looked at two other locations much further to the south: the Azores and Madeira — and in both places they found mice there carried the same genetic signature as that carried by the Viking mouse. Crucially, they found very few mice that carried genetic signatures like those found in mouse populations in Portugal, whose mariners were also reckoned to be the first to settle on these islands.”
“Two of these names, Susaco and Londina, are of particular importance. Susaco — or Porto di Susacho — is found on the earliest charts, from the fourteenth century onwards, and is thought to involve the name ‘Saxons’, perhaps deriving from the Anglo-Saxon folk- and region-name ‘Sussex’ (the ‘South Saxons’).”
“The Solomonic kings of Ethiopia, in Krebs’ retelling, forged trans-regional connections. They ‘discovered’ the kingdoms of late medieval Europe, not the other way around.”
(The authors of this article wrote The Bright Ages, which I enjoyed.)
“The [New York] Times in particular is a well-resourced standard-bearer for digital journalism, with a robust institutional archiving structure. Their interest in facing the challenge of linkrot indicates that it has yet to be understood or comprehensively addressed across the field.”
“[Edison] pushed aggressively for a standardized way of singing — one that aimed to keep American music under unrealistic constraints. This only made the public all the more enthusiastic when something more expansive and free came along. And he unwittingly provided the tools these radical new musicians needed to advance their agenda.”