Welcome to Medieval Mixed-Gender Fight Club.

The first rule of Medieval Mixed-Gender Fight Club is: you do not talk about Medieval Mixed-Gender Fight Club.

The second rule of Medieval Mixed-Gender Fight Club is: you DO NOT talk about Medieval Mixed-Gender Fight Club!

Why?

The Public Domain Review’s managing editor, Hunter Dukes, wisely argues that it’s because we have so little to go on, beyond these startling images of “judicial duels” between men and women in German fencing master Hans Talhoffer‘s illustrated 15th-century “fight books.”

The male combatant, armed with a wooden mace, starts out in a waist-deep hole.

The female, armed with a rock wrapped in a length of cloth, stands above, feet planted to the ground.

Their matching unisex garments wouldn’t look out of place at the Met Gala, and provide for maximum movement as evidenced by the acrobatic, and seriously painful-looking paces Talhoffer puts them through.

Dukes is not alone […]

The seventeen-fifties found Western civilization in the middle of its Age of Enlightenment. That long era introduced on a large scale the notion that, through the use of rationality and scientific knowledge, humanity could make progress. For the Enlightenment’s true believers, it would have eventually become quite easy indeed to assume that we had nowhere to go but up, and would sooner or later attain a state of perfection. No such fantasies, of course, for Jean-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire. Despite being an Enlightenment icon, he pulled no punches in attacking what he saw as its delusions, most lastingly in his 1759 satirical novel Candide, ou l’Optimisme.

Two centuries later, Western civilization, and especially the freshly formed civilization of the United States of America, had entered a new age of reason. Or rather, it had entered an age of technical, industrial, and organizational “know-how.”

The conviction that America could be perfected through engineered systems played its part in generating a degree of prosperity the world had never known (and would have scarcely been imaginable in Voltaire’s day). But […]

Note: Just a quick heads up, Coursera’s $200 discount on Coursera Plus ends on January 31, 2023. If you want to take advantage of the deal, you should have a look soon.

A new deal to start a new year: Between now and January 31, 2023, Coursera is offering a $200 discount on its annual subscription plan called “Coursera Plus.” Normally priced at $399, Coursera Plus (now available for $199) gives you access to 90% of Coursera’s courses, Guided Projects, Specializations, and Professional Certificates, all of which are taught by top instructors from leading universities and companies (e.g. Yale, Duke, Google, Facebook, and more). The $199 annual fee–which translates roughly to 55 cents per day–could be a good investment for anyone interested in learning new subjects and skills in 2023, or earning certificates that can be added to your resume. Just as Netflix’s streaming service gives you access to unlimited movies, Coursera Plus gives you access to unlimited courses and certificates. It’s basically an all-you-can-eat deal.

You can try out […]

One can appreciate the art of Frida Kahlo while knowing nothing of the art of her onetime husband, the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. But the experience of certain of her paintings can be greatly enriched by some knowledge of their relationship, the clearest example being The Two Fridas, which Kahlo painted in 1939 after their divorce. The largest of her numerous self-portraits, it presents the artist as a set of doppelgängers set apart by their attire: one wears a European dress, and the other a traditional Mexican one. The resulting tableau could, on one level, reflect her dual heritage; it also, as Kahlo herself put it, shows “the Frida Diego loved, and the one he didn’t.”

The Two Fridas is the subject of the video essay above from Great Art Explained. “The darker-skinned Frida on the right is the indigenous Mexican Frida that was adored by her husband,” explains its host, gallerist James Payne.

“The lighter-skinned Frida on the left is the European Frida that he rejected.” Presenting herself in the former fashion “sent a clear message […]

New Yorkers can be a maddeningly closed-mouth bunch, selfishly guarding our secret haunts lest they be overrun with newcomers and tourists…

But there’s not much we can do to deflect interest from Grand Central Teminal’s whispering gallery, a wildly popular acoustic anomaly in the tiled passageway just outside its famous Oyster Bar.

So we invite you to bring a friend, position yourselves in opposite corners, facing away from each other, and murmur your secrets to the wall.

Your friend will hear you as clearly as if you’d been whispering directly into their ear…and 9 times out of 10, a curious onlooker will approach to ask what exactly is going on.

Initiate them!

Sharing secrets of this order cultivates civic pride, a powerful force that Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis harnessed when developers threatened to obscure Grand Central’s beauty with a towering addition designed by Modernist architect Marcel Breuer.

Onassis wrote to Mayor Abraham Beame in 1975, hoping to enlist him in the fight to spare midtown Manhattan’s jewel from an […]