How Wearing Ridiculously Long Pointed Shoes Became a Medieval Fashion Trend

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We can all remem­ber see­ing images of medieval Euro­peans wear­ing pointy shoes, but most of us have paid scant atten­tion to the shoes them­selves. That may be for the best, since the more we dwell on one fact of life in the Mid­dle Ages or anoth­er, the more we imag­ine how uncom­fort­able or…

Carl Sagan Predicts the Decline of America: Unable to Know “What’s True,” We Will Slide, “Without Noticing, Back into Superstition & Darkness” (1995)

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Image by Ken­neth Zirkel, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

There have been many the­o­ries of how human his­to­ry works. Some, like Ger­man thinker G.W.F. Hegel, have thought of progress as inevitable. Oth­ers have embraced a more sta­t­ic view, full of “Great Men” and an immutable nat­ur­al order. Then we have the counter-Enlight­en­ment thinker Giambat­tista…

Has SpaceX Done Anything NASA Hasn’t? Neil deGrasse Tyson Explains His “Feud” with Elon Musk

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One would count nei­ther Elon Musk nor Neil deGrasse Tyson among the most reserved pub­lic fig­ures of the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry. Giv­en the efforts Musk has been mak­ing to push into the busi­ness of out­er space, which has long been Tyson’s intel­lec­tu­al domain, it’s only nat­ur­al that the two would come into con­flict. Not long ago,…

Watch the First 2+ Hours of MTV’s Inaugural Broadcast (August 1, 1981)

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Not every­one on August 1, 1981 had a VCR at their dis­pos­al, and not every­body stayed up until mid­night. But for­tu­nate­ly at least one per­son did, in order to tape the first two hours of a new cable chan­nel called MTV: Music Tele­vi­sion. Did they know it would be his­toric? MTV cer­tain­ly hoped it would…

The Nature of Human Stupidity Explained by The 48 Laws of Power Author Robert Greene

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It’s prac­ti­cal­ly guar­an­teed that we now have more stu­pid peo­ple on the plan­et than ever before. Of course, we might be tempt­ed to think; just look at how many of them dis­agree with my pol­i­tics. But this unprece­dent­ed stu­pid­i­ty is pri­mar­i­ly, if not entire­ly, a func­tion of an unprece­dent­ed­ly large glob­al pop­u­la­tion. The more impor­tant…