The mystery of the lost Roman herb
2020-02-04
In fact, Roman cuisine wasn’t at all like Italian food. It was all about contrasting sweet with salty and sour foods (they liked to eat fishgut sauce, garum, with melon). Instead Rowan compares it to modern Chinese food. ‘If it was edible, they were eating it nothing was off the table,’ she says.
— The mystery of the lost Roman herb, Zaria Gorvett in BBC Future
This Is Not the Senate the Framers Imagined
2020-01-21
Indirect election was also crucial to some of the Founders’ faith in the Senate’s ability to act in the public interest-and their decision to vest the Senate with particular powers, including the ‘sole Power’ to conduct impeachment trials. Consider Hamilton’s claim, in ‘Federalist No. 65,’ that only the Senate ‘would be likely to feel confidence enough in its own situation, to preserve, unawed and uninfluenced, the necessary impartiality between an individual accused, and the representatives of the people, his accusers.’ Specifically, he is asserting that unlike their House counterparts (the ‘accusers’ entrusted to render the equivalent of a presidential indictment), individual senators could be expected to issue fair judgments because their selection by fellow political professionals, for relatively long, six-year terms, insulated them from the vicissitudes and foibles of popular opinion.
— This Is Not the Senate the Framers Imagined, Jane Chong in The Atlantic
2019-10-01
I read the Penguin Classics translation of Wasps by Aristophanes the other day. It’s a satirical play about how an older generation of Athenians who fought in the Peloponnesian War were taken in by a pandering demagogue called Cleon. To grasp what’s happening and get the jokes, you have to know a little bit about the context of Athenian politics at the time and how the jury system worked. But all of that is explained in a very quick note at the beginning of the edition.
2019-08-05
There were lots of interesting and terrible things in Superior: The Return of Race Science by Angela Saini but here’s something that stood out. Eugenics was a widely respected field of study around the time of the turn of the 20th century, well before the rash of state-sponsored genocide programs we now associate with Nazis etc. University College London established a Eugenics Record Office, that aimed to study races of man and conct the best ways to hone the (presumably white) superior race to perfection. Of the many people who were both active in the field then, and still respected now: Karl Pearson, inventor of the field of statistics but also the first Professor of National Eugenics at the UCL unit.
2019-07-31
I started reading Little by Edward Carey without knowing what it was about. Soon it emerged that it’s a fictionalisation of the life of Madame Tussaud based on her memoirs. It is typical of a revolutionary French narrative in that it involves a exploited child orphan, the beautiful disarray of Paris at the time, and finally: no shortage of chance encounters with significant historical figures that begin to stretch the reader’s credulity.
2013-10-04
At its most basic level, music is simply a series of amplitudes and frequencies that make human beings move and vocalise in diverse and strange ways. However, like all other forms of human expression and entertainment, it is now a commodity. This commodity is now packaged to be sold, streamed, licensed and advertised to us. The people who distribute the music define our experience with this basic human commodity. These days there’s very little you can do to hear music without interacting with a third party of some kind, short of listening to a friend play guitar in your living room (as long as he’s lot playing from sheet music, royalties abound). The distributors are gatekeepers, and we’re going to explore how drastically their power is waning in the modern age.