Interesting Times

If you were out and about in San Francisco between 1860 and 1880, you might have seen a curious figure on the streets. Joshua Abraham Norton wore a uniform reminiscent of European nobility, made proclamations, and styled himself as “Norton […]

This episode is a little different. About a year ago I was approached by a team of documentary film makers who were making a movie about Polybius, Portland’s mythical video game of doom. I’d previously spoken about Polybius at the […]

Imagine a medieval dungeon. You probably imagine prisoners chained to the wall, a torturer in a black mask tormenting the occupants, several machines of torture such as the rack or the Catherine wheel, and, most imposingly, the dreaded iron maiden, […]

The British Empire and other colonial powers did a lot of things wrong, and they famously ignored actual human patterns when drawing borders of Africa. In 1899, the British drew a border between Egypt and Sudan that simply ran in […]

Hong Xiuquan and his Taiping rebels successfully founded a new kingdom in southern China. The Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace sought to overthrow the Manchurian Qing Dynasty and form a new, radically different China. Hong, the supposed younger brother of […]

In the 1850s a man who styled himself as the younger brother of Jesus Christ led China into a bloody rebellion. China in the early 1800s was ravaged by famine, natural disasters, and British meddling that introduced opium (and the […]

The foreboding form of Alcatraz Island looms just beyond San Francisco, an obvious symbol of isolation and punishment. Alcatraz was never the biggest, or worst, or longest-lived prison in American history, but it’s definitely the most iconic. The island fortress […]

One of the most persistent myths of the Middle Ages was that of Prester John, a mythical Christian king whose supposed domain was located beyond the eastern Muslim regions. Probably the most vivid portion of the myth is a letter […]

Today’s episode is slightly different than our other entries. We have another interview episode, this time with Joseph Barker, who has a PhD in artifical intelligence, and whom I quoted in the last episode about the mechanical Turk. Instead of talking […]

Humans have pursued artificial intelligence, in one form or another, for generations. One of the most potent signifiers of intelligence has, historically, been chess. Even though the ability to play the game does not actually require as much cognition as, […]

In 1904 a Greek-American playboy, Ion Perdicaris was, along with his stepson Cromwell, kidnapped in Morocco by a man who would later be called “The last of the Barbary pirates.” The incident sparked a degree of outrage in the US, […]

The most complete tyrannosaurus rex skeleton in the world, nicknamed “Sue,” in honor of the paleontologist who discovered her, stands over adoring crowds at Chicago’s Field Museum. However, Sue’s journey the field museum was not an easy one, though. Prior […]

On Sunday, March 15th I had the privilege of introducing one of my favorite movies of all time at the historic Clinton Street Theater, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The organizers of the event asked me to talk about […]

In the late 1800s countless men were exploited by a system that used debt and indentured servitude to keep them tied to the shipping industry. The process of getting sailors into debt was called “crimping,” and it was practiced throughout […]

In the late 1600s Scotland, in an attempt to start an international trade empire, founded a small settlement in what is now modern Panama. The venture was frustrated at every turn by the English, who did not want their northern […]

You can do a lot of things with wealth. You can buy stuff, make things happen, bribe officials, give to the poor… Or, if you’re Mansa Musa of Mali (one of the richest people in the history of the world) […]

Probably the most violent singular example of post-slavery racial violence in the US happened in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921. Mobs of armed whites burned buildings, killed African-Americans, and utterly destroyed what had been known as Tulsa’s “Black Wall Street.” For […]

This week we interviewed a pirate! Kind of. Jaime Kirk is the current captain of PDX Yar, a Portland organization dedicated to all things piratical. The crew does, indeed, dress up like pirates for the purposes of revelry carousing, but […]

In 1979 a group of religious extremists seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca and began a siege that would last over two weeks. The bloody event shook the Muslim world, and prompted reactions in Saudi Arabia that affect that country […]

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