Perhaps one day I will become the kind of person who reads 6,000 words on Roman aqueducts on a Tuesday evening. But right now, my Roman aqueduct browser tab sits pixels away from a live blog of a geopolitical tragedy, which sits pixels away from a Wikipedia entry for a painting, which sits pixels away from a page on pension funds, which sits pixels away from a stew recipe. The proximity of these worlds is absurd. In physical space, I would have to walk …
We look back upon the people of the early networked societies not with scorn, but with reverence. Our understanding of the second millennium was permanently changed when our excavators breached the permafrost vaults of the far north and discovered a frozen city of text and images. From the Svalbard cache, we were able to partially reconstruct the twilight of that era. The world of these people was full of invisible spirits that listened without ears and spoke without lungs. While they also built larger …
Today, watches are more or less universal, folded into phones and fitness trackers or strapped to wrists of all kinds. And yet, not too long ago, in the 19th century, different ways of wearing time were sharply gendered and coded. For men, pocket watches coordinated time. Railways depended on standardised pocket watches to prevent collisions and make timetables possible at all. The logic of precise, shared time leaked into other social contexts. Catching the right train, showing up to court on time, and making …
As a software engineer, I regularly use AI and tools like Copilot in my work, all well within our company’s privacy policy. In some ways, these tools genuinely boost my productivity, but they also stir up constant questions: Will automation make my job redundant? Will companies rush toward AI and leave essential manual skills behind? Yet, after years spent learning in public through this blog, I learnt to pay more attention to the past to better understand the future. History, as journalist Norman Cousins …
In 1856, the French government faced a peculiar problem in Algeria. The Marabouts, local religious leaders, were using what appeared to be supernatural abilities to convince locals that France’s colonial presence could be overcome by divine intervention. Napoleon III, the French Emperor at the time, needed something stronger than military force; he needed to shatter the Marabouts’ mystical authority entirely. So he did what any reasonable emperor would do: fight fire with fire. Napoleon III sent a magician to Algeria. Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, already …
A few years ago, we visited Airfield Estate here in Dublin, a working farm that we love taking our daughter to, and I highly recommend it if you are ever in the area. This heritage estate has rewilded areas, a huge playground in the forest, and convenient access via Luas (Dublin’s tram system). But on this particular sunny day, when it felt like we had the farm just for us, we went as usual to say hello to the hens. And then the rooster …
People get cast in molds (of status and roles) for which they are variously equipped. The problem lies between man’s creativeness and diversity and the rather specific needs of his institutions, for most cultures and the institutions they engender represent highly specialized solutions to rather specific problems. For example, in England during the early days of the industrial revolution, villagers and field hands were brought into the factory to work. These first generations of mill hands were not conditioned to the whistle. Like all preindustrial …
The fewer the words, the harder the job. Dame Lynley Dodd Finding non-anthropomorphic children’s books about animals with exquisite rhyme and repetition is remarkably difficult. When our daughter turned two, that crucial age for language acquisition, we discovered Hairy Maclary from Donaldson’s Dairy, and we immediately fell under the magic of New Zealand author-illustrator Lynley Dodd. We devoured every book we could find, meeting the unforgettable cast of characters: Hairy Maclary himself, Schnitzel von Krumm with his very low tum, Bitzer Maloney all skinny and bony, …