Trevor Noah Explains How Kintsugi, the Japanese Art of Repairing Pottery, Helped Him Overcome Life’s Tragedies

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Trevor Noah end­ed his stint as the host of The Dai­ly Show a lit­tle over three years ago, but he’s made him­self into anoth­er kind of pop-cul­tur­al pres­ence since then. In evi­dence, we have his appear­ance above on the pop­u­lar pod­cast and YouTube show Diary of a CEO. For more than two and a half hours,…

Can Genius Be Taught? The Polgár Sisters and the Experiment That Put the Question to the Test

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As any new par­ent soon finds out, there exists a robust mar­ket for prod­ucts, ser­vices, and media that promise to boost a child’s intel­li­gence. Some of these offer­ings come as close as legal­ly pos­si­ble to hold­ing out the promise of putting any tot on the path to genius, brazen­ly beg­ging the ques­tion of whether it’s…

Hear James Joyce Reads From Ulysses and Finnegans Wake In His Only Two Recordings (1924/1929)

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As much as it is about every part of Dublin that ever passed by James Joyce’s once-young eyes, Ulysses is also a book about books, and about writ­ing and speech—as myth­ic invo­ca­tion, as seduc­tion, chat­ter, and rhetoric, ful­some and emp­ty. Words—two-faced, like open books—carry with them at least two sens­es, the mean­ing of their…

The Ancient Tool Used in Japan to Strengthen Memory & Focus: The Abacus

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William Gib­son famous­ly observed that the future is already here, it’s just not even­ly dis­trib­uted. That line is often thought to have been inspired by Japan, which was already pro­ject­ing a thor­ough­ly futur­is­tic image, at least in pop­u­lar cul­ture, by the time he made his debut with Neu­ro­mancer in 1984. But as any­one who’s spent enough…

Dictionary of the Oldest Written Language–It Took 90 Years to Complete, and It’s Now Free Online

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It took 90 years to com­plete. But, in 2011, schol­ars at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go final­ly pub­lished a 21-vol­ume dic­tio­nary of Akka­di­an, the lan­guage used in ancient Mesopotamia. Unspo­ken for 2,000 years, Akka­di­an was pre­served on clay tablets and in stone inscrip­tions until schol­ars deci­phered it dur­ing the last two cen­turies.

In the past,…