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22.01.2026 16:22
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Today in WaPo… Dead soldiers’ teeth reveal diseases that doomed Napoleon’s army: “This new study reinforces how impossible the whole enterprise was; in a time before railroads and antibiotics, the invasion [of Russia] was doomed before it even began.” archive.today/EoayR
Today's award for a clever book title goes to... 😄
#TIL that “few know that the genius behind [Topps “Wacky Cards” stickers] was none other than Art Spiegelman--the Pulitzer Prize--winning graphic novelist who created Maus.” 😲
bookshop.org/p/books/wack...
A lovely little mini-documentary on the replacing of the last HORSE elevators in NYC 🐴
laughingsquid.com/last-ride-in...
Fascinating! A new perspective on Incan khipus… 👩🏽🪢
archaeology.org/news/2025/08...
@austinkleon.bsky.social
I’ve been a longtime fan of your newsletter, but I’m unsubscribing from all Substacks… Please move yours off Substack! 🙏
leavesubstack.com
#TIL: Herbert Hoover was a mining geologist who — together with his wife Lou Hoover, the first woman to earn a geology degree from Stanford — created the definitive English translation of “De Re Metallica,” a sixteenth-century text about mining and metallurgy.
www.neatorama.com/2025/08/09/H...
@sarahebond.bsky.social Please move “Pasts Imperfect” off Substack! 🙏
leavesubstack.com
There was a period when ABBA was decidedly seen as cringe, but they prevailed in the end. I agree we’ll have to wait and see if history repeats for Coldplay… 23 years since “Clocks,” only little more than a quarter century to go! 😁
Wait, this study seems not to have been peer-reviewed, no?
Plus AI can only access digitalized sources, and mountains of documentation aren’t digitized!
I can’t decide if it’s ludicrous or horrifying.
BTW, if you want to save energy/water — or if for other reasons you like to limit AI — on some platforms like DuckDuckGo you can go to settings & turn automatic AI off. And if you want an easy way to use Google w/out AI — and even get its old style of results — try
udm14.org!
Admittedly, it’s not culinary rocket surgery, but I’m under the weather at the moment and was grateful for the assist. 😊
Recipe
So… I was looking for a recipe for microwaved “baked” apples without added sugar. After a regular web search came up empty, I turned to @claudeai.bsky.social, and it came through… So, I’m sharing the bounty! 🍎
Good news for Coldplay is that, historically speaking, appreciation for ABBA changed tremendously with the success of “Mamma Mia,” so apparently Coldplay only needs a blockbuster Broadway musical/movie to regain fully their pop culture dignity!
👯💃🕺👯
My music tastes are varied, so I hadn’t quite realized that Coldplay had gained the same reputation that ABBA had back in the ‘80s: thoroughly enjoyable pop music that’s simultaneously just a little bit cringe
Would love to see the whole thing! 🤩
I have a theory that Italian café napkins are some of the least absorbant substances on earth just to keep people from taking wads of them to use at home. 🤔
Another step in cracking a culinary mystery: “Ancient DNA Unlocks the Secret Recipe of Roman Fish Sauce”!
gizmodo.com/ancient-dna-...
Bringing to light the missing links between the ancien régime and modernity, The Frankenstein of 1790 and Other Lost Chapters from Revolutionary France is an ambitious account of a remarkable politico-literary moment and its aftermath.”
& others were transformed into new tales with ongoing appeal.
She uncovers a 1790 story of an automaton-builder named Frankénsteïn, links Baum to the suffrage campaign going back to 1789, and discovers a royalist anthem’s power to undo Balzac’s Père Goriot. [cont.]
Deploying political history, archival research & textual analysis with 👁️-opening results, Douthwaite focuses on 5 major events btween 1789 & 1794—1st in newspapers, then in fiction—& shows how the symbolic stories generated by Louis XVI, Robespierre, the market women who stormed Versailles… [cont.]
can be found in novels by the likes of Mary Shelley, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, & L. Frank Baum. [cont.]
In this book, Julia V. Douthwaite explores how the works w/in this enormous corpus announced the new shapes of literature to come & reveals that vestiges of these stories… [cont.]
“The French Revolution brings to mind violent mobs, the guillotine, and Madame Defarge, but it was also a publishing revolution: more than 1,200 novels were published between 1789 and 1804, when Napoleon declared the Revolution at an end. [cont.]
FREE book of the month from U of Chicago Press: “The Frankenstein of 1790 and Other Lost Chapters from Revolutionary France”
press.uchicago.edu/books/freeEb...
What a remarkable discovery! 🤩
www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/73513
A brand new article on Architectural Digest about the dangers confronting Venice for which I was interviewed…
www.architecturaldigest.com/story/is-ven...