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In 1868 Henry T. Brown wrote a book called Five Hundred and Seven Mechanical Movements. The subtitle is an apt description of the contents: EMBRACINGALL THOSE WHICH ARE MOST IMPORTANT INDYNAMICS, HYDRAULICS, HYDROSTATICS, PNEUMATICS, STEAM ENGINES,

Every year since 1993, hackers, researchers, computer security specialists, and government intelligence employees have gathered in Las Vegas for the annual DEF CON. This year Clifford Stoll gave an energetic talk on the 40th anniversary of the hacker ...

My incurable optimist friend, Kevin Kelly, co-founder of Wired and my partner at Cool Tools and the Recomendo newsletter, has been posting essays on Substack mainly about the future, artificial intelligence, and what it means for humanity. I am ...

Having finished The Tainted Cup, I immediately dove into the next Ana and Din novel by Robert Jackson Bennett. I also finished the third in the series. Now I must wait. This series fantasy worldbuilding inside of a detective novel is really a lot of ...

Pompous scholars were a standard joke on the Italian stage through the 16th century. Arnoud Visser writes in The Public Domain Review that Francesco Belo, a playwright from Rome, published the first play to put one at the center. In El pedante, from ...

Jonathan Weber has written a history of San Francisco's rise as a global technology capital and the crises that came with it. City on the Edge: Technology, Politics, and the Fight for the Soul of San Francisco opens in the early 1990s, when San ...

Louis Pope Gratacap was the curator of mineralogy at the American Museum of Natural History from 1880 until his death in 1917. He usually read during his three-hour round trip to the museum from Staten Island. He also wrote novels, and one of them,

A French manuscript from about 1485 shows a woman spinning wool in her doorway while her child plays beside her. The doorway is the mouth of a giant snail shell. She lives there. Robert Testard painted it for Charles d'Angoulême, a count in ...

Robert Jackson Bennett's The Tainted Cup delivers everything I want from a fantasy detective story. Wonderful characters, fantastic world-building, and a mystery worth solving. Bennett tells the story from the point of view of Din Kol, an altered ...

Doi Toshitsura was a feudal lord in Edo-period Japan who studied snow for about twenty years. His 1832 book of woodblock prints, Sekka Zusetsu, has eighty-six drawings of what he called "snow flowers" (sekka), plus a dozen more copied from a 1779 ...