OpenAI's "Study Mode" and the risks of flattery

"Bring Your Whole Self" – Unless You Have a Toddler

The Brilliant Cruelty of Henry James's Criticism

A Handshake in Orbit 50 Years Ago Transformed the Space Race

Local Hole

Why Science Hasn't Solved Consciousness (Yet)

Early Triassic super-greenhouse climate driven by vegetation collapse

Kamishibai

The Adding Machine

Scientists Retrace 30k-Year-Old Sea Voyage, in a Hollowed-Out Log

Oswald the Lucky Rabbit

The curse of Toumaï: an ancient skull and a bitter feud over humanity's origins

Defending adverbs exuberantly if conditionally

Sid Meier's Pirates – In-depth (2017)

The Art of the Critic

Making maps with noise functions (2022)

Why were Belle Époque cities beautiful?

William James's Grief (2024)

Onfim's world: Child artists in history

Ninth Bridgewater Treatise

As Bright as a Feather: Ostriches, Home Dyeing, and the Global Plume Trade

Henry James's family tried to keep him in the closet (2016)

Hill or High Water

AI makes the humanities more important, but also a lot weirder

The Once and Future Genius

Shakespeare may not have been a remote husband, new study finds

How Much Should You Know About Your Child Before He's Born?

Henry James was not at home in America

Georgetown–IBM Experiment

Mistaking Mary Magdalene

Home Depot's $20B secret garden

Onfim's World: Child artists in history

Typographic Pictures Composed Entirely of Brass Rule (2024)

When Jorge Luis Borges met one of the founders of AI

Lapham's Quarterly Announces New Stewardship

Legacy of the Angels

The Wright brothers invented the airplane, right? Not if you're in Brazil

Pain Management Before Anaesthetics

Small Archives

Somnium Scipionis

Diobolgeldæ (The Devil's Money): The Early-Medieval Cult Site of Hezingen

Games We Played

AI legibility, physical archives, and the future of research

Lonesome George

The Drift of Things: David Goodman Croly's Glimpses of the Future (1888)

The Emperor's New Clothes: Fashion, Politics, and Identity in Mughal South Asia

Rifling through the archives with Robert Caro

Gustatory Wisdom: Bruegel the Elder's Twelve Proverbs (1558)

Computer Simulation of Neural Networks Using Spreadsheets (2018)

An Economic Approach to Homer's Odyssey: Part I

Turtle (Submersible)

Incised artefacts from the Middle Palaeolithic and human behavioural complexity

Shadows of the Coming Race (1879)

George Eliot's reflections on AGI from 1879

Edgware 1924: The Making of a Suburb

Wolf Interval

An Egyptian Temple Reborn

Laryngeal Theory

The familiar loneliness of the Kinetoscope

A luminous, brave, and unputdownable article about blurbs

Gold-Digging Ant

RCA and the Roaring Twenties

Using generative AI as part of historical research: three case studies

2k-year-old wine and the uncanny immediacy of the past

Strontium isoscape of sub-Saharan Africa allows tracing slave trade (2024)

Mummies' Ancient Tattoos Come Under Laser Focus

Sutton Hoo and Syria: Anglo-Saxons who served in the Byzantine army?

How Pac-Man Revolutionized Gaming (2020)

Public Domain Image Archive

Wends of Texas

Stone selection by wild chimpanzees shares patterns with Oldowan hominins

Dancing Days of the Maya

The accidental invention of the snow globe (2024)

Archimedes, Vitruvius and Leonardo: The Odometer Connection (2020)

Abstand and Ausbau Languages

Secondary Consciousness

White House Reconstruction

Gods: Charles Fort's Book of the Damned (1919)

Synergistic, multi-level understanding of psychedelics

Why did clothing become boring?

Minakata Kumagusu

For the Love of a Little Sea

Magicians Mount Search for Woman Behind Decades-Old Deception

With DNA, Pompeii Narratives Take a Twist

Reconstruction of Lomonosov's Discovery of Venus's Atmosphere (2012) [pdf]