“The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter,” declares the opening poem in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats by T. S. Eliot. But the possibilities are many and varied: “Peter, Augustus, Alonzo or James”; “Plato, Admetus, Electra, Demeter”; “Munkustrap, Quaxo, or Coricopat.” Things must have been  less complicated in the Middle Ages, when you could just call a cat Gyb and be done with it. “The shortened form of the male name Gilbert, Gyb” explains Kathleen Walker-Meikle in Medieval Cats, dates as “a popular name for individual pet cats” at least back to the late fourteenth century.

In a slightly different form, the name even appears in Shakespeare, when Falstaff describes himself as “as melancholy as a gib cat.” Gyb’s equivalent across the Chanel was Tibers or Tibert; the sixteenth-century French poet Joachim du Bellay kept a “beloved gray cat” named Belaud.

Legal texts reveal that the Irish went in for “cat names that refer to the animal’s physical appearance,” like Méone (“little meow”), Cruibne (“little paws”), and Bréone (“little […]

The Youtuber “EmperorTigerstar” specializes in documenting the unfolding of world historical events by stitching together hundreds of maps into timelapse films. In years past, we’ve featured his “map animations” of the U.S. Civil War (1861-1865), World War I (1914-1918), and World War II (1939-1945). Today, we’re highlighting a more ambitious project, an attempt to visually document the rise and fall of the Romans. The video covers 2,000 years of history, in just ten minutes.

Moving from 753 BC  to 1479 AD, the animated map shows Rome’s territorial boundaries changing as the Roman Kingdom morphs into the Roman Republic and later the Roman Empire. Then the gravity of history takes over and we experience the gradual decline of Roman civilization. We see the bifurcation that splits the Empire into Western and Eastern (Byzantine) parts, until only a little piece remains.

Related Content:

The History of Ancient Rome in 20 Quick Minutes: A Primer Narrated by Brian Cox

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We have covered it before: school districts across the United States are increasingly censoring books that don’t align with conservative, white-washed visions of the world. Art Spiegelman’s Maus, The Illustrated Diary of Anne Frank, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird–these are some of the many books getting pulled from library shelves in American schools. In response to this concerning trend, the Brooklyn Public Library has made a bold move: For a limited time, the library will offer a free eCard to any person aged 13 to 21 across the United States, allowing them free access to 500,000 digital books, including many censored books. The Chief Librarian for the Brooklyn Public Library, Nick Higgins said:

A public library represents all of us in a pluralistic society we exist with other people, with other ideas, other viewpoints and perspectives and that’s what makes a healthy democracy — not shutting down access to those points of view or silencing […]

We live in an age of subtitles. On some level this is a vindication of the cinephiles who spent so much of the twentieth century complaining about shoddy dubbing of foreign films and public unwillingness to “read movies.” Today we think nothing of reading not just movies but television shows as well, even those performed in our native language. For an increasing proportion of at-home viewers — including on-computer, on-tablet, and on-phone viewers — subtitles have come to feel like a necessity, even in the absence of any hearing difficulties. Vox’s Edward Vega investigates why this has happened in the video above.

The chief irony of the story is that the intelligibility of film and television dialogue seems to have degraded as a result of sound recording and editing technology having improved. Back in the early days of sound film, actors had practically to shout into bulky microphones concealed on-set or placed just off it. Today, a production can keep a couple of boom mics suspended overhead at all times, but also rig each actor up with a few hidden […]

Your Pretty Much Pop A-Team Mark Linsenmayer, Lawrence Ware, Sarahlyn Bruck, and Al Baker discuss the original 1883 freaky children’s story by Carlo Collodi and consider the recent rush of film versions, from a new Disney/Robert Zemikis CGI take to Guillermo del Toro’s stop-motion passion project to a heavily costumed Italian version by Matteo Garrone, which is the second to feature Oscar winner Roberto Benigni in a lead role. Benigni’s previous try was a 2002 version that is the most true to the beats of the original story and maybe because of this has a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes. Why do people keep remaking this story, and how has the original moral of “be a good boy and obey” changed over the years?

Read the original story. Some articles going through the film versions include:

• “The twisted history of Pinocchio on […]