Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
A headline in The Daily Mail Tuesday asks the question, “Did Amelia Earhart die a castaway after crashing on a Pacific island?” Though I’ve never seen her bones or examined her plane’s wreckage or fingered through old files documenting her many distress calls, I feel confident answering that question with an emphatic yes. Yes, Amelia…
Illustration: Jim Cooke In September of 1984, at least 751 people got violently sick in The Dalles, Oregon. At first, no one in the town could figure out why. Those sickened had all eaten at ten different restaurants in the area, but local health officials couldn’t find a common food that may have caused their…
Feelin’ Alt-Right (Act 1, Part 1) | Full Frontal with Samantha Bee | TBS SubscribeSubscribedUnsubscribe427,455427K Add to Want to watch this again later? Sign in to add this video to a playlist. Sign in Share More Report Need to report the video? Sign in to report inappropriate content. Sign in 1,360 Like this video? Sign…
A German crowd gives the Nazi salute to the U.S. Olympic contingent as it marches past the reviewing stand of Olympics host Adolf Hitler, pictured in semi-silhouette on the right. (International News Photos) BERLIN — When a video of two Donald Trump supporters shouting “Lügenpresse” (lying press) started to circulate Sunday, viewers from Germany soon noted its…
“This is what’s happening: I’m going to hit this guy.” Listening to Tanya Smith talk about her longsword fighting strategy is like hearing a battle-scarred general talk tactics. But looking at her, it’s kind of hard to picture how she executes it. She’s five foot two and, in her own words, has “stubby little arms”…
(Photos: Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg/Wikipedia) Fierce German mercenary knight Götz von Berlichingen loved a good feud. As a soldier for hire in the early 1500s, he and his rogue crew of rabble-rousers fought on behalf of whichever Bavarian dukes and barons had the biggest beefs and the fattest wallets. But all this battling came at a personal cost. In 1504,…
Wrecked machinery in the Chernobyl sarcophagus. (All Photos: Alexander Kupny) It is hard to imagine the circumstances why someone would want to climb into a small hole under the Chernobyl’s infamous—and dangerous—charred No. 4 reactor. But Alexander Kupny did just that, many times. The explosion that occurred on April 26, 1986, blew off the building’s four…
There is perhaps no greater argument that American English is a deeply flawed, infuriating, and difficult language than the simple phrase “you guys.” “You guys” is the most common way Americans refer directly to a group of people; it is a de facto pronoun, duct-taped together. If you remember your high school linguistics, you might…
As a medieval historian, I’ve been watching the ways in which Trump, other politicians, and even plenty of journalists characterize ISIS and its horrific actions as “medieval.” I’ve always thought it was a mistake, but a mistake mostly limited to the world of rhetoric. On Friday, that changed. Three men were arrested for plotting to…
Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani on Wednesday called out Hillary Clinton for suggesting she was in New York on 9/11 — and social media critics responded with pictures that show her next to him at Ground Zero a day later. Clinton was in Washington, DC, on 9/11. She visited lower Manhattan the next day — with…