The people who love you say your name wrong. Your mother’s version, your oldest friend’s version. There’s a softness that is never in the official pronunciation. A name that existed before you became whoever the world made you. And then those people die and the correct

Did you know that the house of wisdom was one of the greatest libraries which was destroyed by the mongols back in the 13th century? So much so that the Tigris river ran black with ink! youtu.be/orQQ_tpVzuo

lol how the hell is it always sunny when I come to Manchester?! I’ve heard horrible things about the weather

Seeing this on my table makes me feel like coming home Barnes & Noble

So "propaganda" in its current form was invented in 1622 by the pope as a job title. A new office in Rome: Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, the Department for the Propagation of Faith. they needed it because a German goldsmith, 167 years earlier, had broken the world when he

people have been losing their minds over fictional characters since at least 1748, when a woman cursed Samuel Richardson for letting his heroine die. one third of his readers refused to buy the final volumes. the replika divorces and the character.ai lawsuits feel new

TIL that when in Sex and the city, carrie reads to big from a book called love letters of great men. no such book existed, it was a prop. And within weeks, readers flooded booksellers asking for it. And within months, two different publishers had written the book backwards into

Somewhere tonight, in a bedroom in Toronto or Amsterdam or Bengaluru, a bengali is lying in the dark with earphones in. a voice comes on, mir afsar ali, usually. the baritone. the story begins the way these stories always do, it was raining, the last train had gone, the house

grief can physically change the shape of your heart. the left ventricle, shocked by a surge of stress hormones, balloons outward. doctors call it takotsubo, after the japanese pot used to catch octopus. the body does not distinguish between losing someone and a wound. you are,

There exists in Persian a word - fanaa (فناء), annihilation, by which the Sufi denotes the vanishing of the lover into the beloved. Rumi said that love is only complete when the lover is no longer present to observe it, he advised us to die before we die.

TIL that in edo japan, pornography was a household object. shunga, erotic woodblock prints were standard in a daimyo bride’s trousseau as a sex manual. the shogunate banned them in 1661 but they continued to be produced. samurai kept shunga in their armor chests, believing

goosebumps evolved to raise fur you no longer have. cold. fear. predators. the oldest alarm in the mammalian body. it still fires for a cello solo, for a key change, for a line of a poem landing right. your most ancient warning system has learned to ring for beauty.

The cherry blossom, is beautiful for the precise reason that it lasts a week. Beauty becomes fully beauty only at the moment it is leaving. The Japanese call it mono no aware (物の哀れ) - the pathos of things.

Big fan of this

TIL that during pregnancy, cells from the baby cross the placenta and lodge in the mother’s bloodstream. they migrate to her heart, her liver, her brain. they stay there for decades, sometimes for the rest of her life. every mother carries fragments of her children inside her

The desert monks of fourth-century Egypt spoke of acedia, the noonday demon, the spiritual sloth that descended at midday, when the sun stood still and the cell felt like a tomb. It doesn’t talk about laziness but something graver, the exhaustion of one who can no longer find a