Antonio Stradivari worked in Cremona in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and the instruments he made have become the most valuable objects in music. Individual examples sell for…
No word is truly untranslatable — you can always explain it in a sentence. What these words offer is compression: a single term for something English needs a paragraph to…
Picture a world map. Almost everyone picturing one is imagining the same thing: a rectangle, with a large Greenland floating at the top, Canada and Russia spread enormously across the…
Source: Wikipedia
The Royal Observatory at Greenwich has one of the more unusual tourist attractions in the world: a line on the ground. Visitors queue for a photograph straddling it, one…
Some words carry a location inside them. A city that made a fabric, a port that shipped a wine, an island that lent its name to a shape — the…
Most inherited traits are messy. Height involves hundreds of genetic contributions. Most physical characteristics are the product of many genes interacting with environment and chance, which is why family resemblance…