How to be a Tudor by Ruth Goodman

...ever see that described? Yet somehow, I feel better for understanding the making and maintenance process of these things. Now the ruff seems less like the inexplicable product of an alien civilization. Just think, someone (many someones) made that ruff and all those baubles and do-dads by hand Did you know folks could change the color of their ruffs in and out by treating them different colored starches? Or that there were colored ruffs at all? (...

Read…

More on How to Make Clear Ice

...amper English has done my work for me and carefully tested every clear ice making method and documented the results in painstaking detail on his entertaining and enlightening blog Alcademics. The winning method he suggests is the one I wrote about: freezing ice in a cooler (also known as “directional freezing”). The distilled water and hot water methods don’t work, according to English. I also learned that the enigmatic David Rees (author of a boo...

Read…

What You Can Do to Make Our Streets Safer

...street where 5 people have died and 34 have been seriously injured between 2009 and 2017), he responded with this terse and arrogant Tweet: Between Frazier’s death and my own councilman’s intemperate tweeting, I’ve been too angry to write or work on the podcast this week. The week’s bad news (an acquaintance of mine also broke 11 ribs in a bike vs. car crash) brought up bad memories of the bike and pedestrian advocacy that I was a part of years a...

Read…

The Year We Gave Up Our Smart Phones

...got interrupted and too many accidents happened. In the years leading up to 2023 we came to understand our smart phones the way 20th century folks came to understand cigarettes, as addictive, unhealthy and destructive. Just like the cigarette executives the tech billionaires got our kids hooked to their unhealthy products. They ruthlessly mined our attention for dollars. Consider it lucky when those same tech billionaires got stranded on the Bezos...

Read…

Saturday Linkages: We Are All Liars

...which the machine knows nothing. This production is not for the purpose of making meaning. It is for the purpose of producing effects on users that keep us hooked. It is for the purpose of making users the conduits of the machine’s power, keeping its effects in circulation. Faked celebrity deaths, trolling, porn clickbait, advertisements, flurries of food and animal pictures, thirst traps, the endless ticker tape of messages mean less than they pe...

Read…