From Sanchia Berg for the BBC: "In the summer of 1944, in a village in German-occupied western France, a slim young woman with dark hair and grey-green eyes sat in a building with a wireless set, tapping out messages in Morse code. She was an agent in the Special
From Ian Sample for The Guardian: "When the blast from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius reached Herculaneum in AD79, it burned hundreds of ancient scrolls to a crisp in the library of a luxury villa and buried the Roman town in ash and pumice. The disaster appeared to have
From Adam Mastroianni at Experimental History: "There's something very weird about the timeline of scientific discoveries. For the first few thousand years, it’s mostly math. The Greeks had the beginnings of trigonometry by ~120 BCE. Chinese mathematicians figured out the fourth digit of pi by the
From Katie Hafner at Scientific American: "Christine Essenberg had an unusual life and career trajectory. She was married, then divorced and earned her Ph.D. in zoology from the University of California, Berkeley, at age 41. She went on to become one of the early researchers at what is
From Marco Giancotti at Nautilus: "A synthetic female voice speaks into my ears over the electronic clamor: “top hat.” I close my eyes and I imagine a top hat. For most people, this should be a rather simple exercise, perhaps even satisfying. For me, it’s a considerable strain,
From David Pierson at the New York Times: "The boy had seemed destined for a life of affluence and earthly pursuits. Born into the family behind a major mining conglomerate in Mongolia, he might have been picked to someday lead the company from its steel-and-glass headquarters in the country’
From Stephanie Clifford at Esquire: "I met Leon in the fall of 1993, when we were new sophomores at Phillips Exeter Academy, a competitive New Hampshire boarding school. He seemed instantly at ease—tall, with excellent posture, a puffed-out chest, and an easy grin. He made the soccer team
From Joaquim Salles for Atlas Obscura: "Just off the coast of Astoria, Queens, at the confluence of the Harlem and East Rivers, is a narrow tidal channel. Hell Gate. Its fast currents change multiple times a day and it used to be riddled with rocks just beneath the surface.
From Tom Donaghy for The Atavist: "In the early 1960s, Harry had a string of Copper Kettle Fudge shops up and down the Shore. So revered were his stores that Harry was known far and wide as the Fudge King. He was even in talks to build a fudge
From Andreas Babst for Neue Zircher Zeitung: "In 1969, the Intercontinental Hotel, Afghanistan's first luxury hotel, opened. It was built in a time that feels much further away than the year suggests. Afghanistan was at war for more than forty years. Rulers came and went, and every
From Emily Zarevich for JSTOR Daily: "Flamboyant, swashbuckling cross-dressing was nothing new in late nineteenth-century France. Paris’s unique and bohemian lesbian subculture allowed these women to thrive, though it was still illegal for French women to wear pants in public. Yet despite the dangers and the occasional assaults,
From Middle East Monitor: "In an effort to modernise while maintaining its Islamic character, Iran is exploring the use of artificial intelligence to assist its religious seminaries. The initiative is centred in the holy city of Qom, home to half of its 200,000 Shia clerics and Iran’s