On the human desire to hurl (and hurl things at) animals, and other humans. In the fourth volume of Brett’s Miscellany, published in Dublin in 1757, readers could find an entry on a custom called “throwing at cocks.” This was an activ…
The American temperament lights up at the prospect of discovery: we laud an addition to Whitman’s oeuvre without understanding the existing Whitman oeuvre.
On the thirty-sixth anniversary of the photographer's death, James McWilliams reconsiders her work.
The loneliness of the long-distance runner.In the early 1970s, John Tarrant, a British ultramarathoner who set world records in the forty- and hundred-mile distances, suffered a hemorrhaging stomach ulcer that occasionally sent him to the hospital f…
We’re away until January 4, but we’re re-posting some of our favorite pieces from 2015. Please enjoy, and have a happy New Year!The complicated sex drive of William Byrd II.William Byrd II was a colonial Virginia gentleman who, on occasion, was no ge…
The complicated sex drive of William Byrd II.William Byrd II was a colonial Virginia gentleman who, on occasion, was no gentleman at all. Writing about himself in the third person, in 1723, he bemoaned “the combustible manner in his constitution”…
Long before environmentalism, Charles Valentine Riley had a problem with pesticide.In science, good ideas often trump great ones. Take, for instance, Charles Valentine Riley, the most prescient scientist of whom you’ve never heard. The man had a gr…
Whither the breadfruit?There’s such a thing as the Breadfruit Institute, and there should be. Researchers consider the species a “NUS”—“neglected and underutilized species.” But Ian Cole, the Breadfruit Institute’s collection manager, t…