Breaking away a little bit from our more traditional language-specific topics, I wanted to spend a bit of time discussing a very interesting and complicated corner of the world, and dig into where the borders are between Europe and Asia, particularly with regards to Armenia, and why it matters. I was inspired to do this…
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Perhaps my favorite bit of hate mail ever, the Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks is actually the title of a famous painting showing the raucous drafting of a semi-legendary letter sent as a bold response to a demand for military surrender.
We’re all familiar with the greats of antiquity and their Greco-Roman names. Your Maximuses and your Augustuses and countless others whose names litter our high school history texts with dates we can hardly remember. During the 15th and 16th centuries, rich, fancy Renaissance Europeans used some strange naming conventions. Foregoing their family names, it was…
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Books are a generally happy and wholesome topic that most people who aren’t Kanye West agree are interesting, valuable, or otherwise just generally positive elements in our lives. I very recently wrote a lengthy article about Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press and, despite its enormous impact on European life and the trajectory of the world thereafter,…
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Not long ago I was wandering through the exhibits at Hamburg’s Museum der Arbeit, or Museum of Work – the second most quintessentially German thing to have ever existed, right ahead of Lübeck’s annual Kartoffeltage (potato days festival) and just behind a giant statue of David Hasselhoff smashing a wall with a musical sledgehammer. This…
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