Card games spread along the same routes as trade and armies, mutating at every border. Here are seventeen, and what is known about where each came from.
1. Whist -…
Everything below comes down to the same thing: the place you are visiting is somewhere other people are trying to get to work. Here are seventeen things worth knowing.
1.…
The leaf is doing three jobs at once: container, cooking vessel and seasoning. Which leaf is used depends entirely on what grows nearby, and the flavour it contributes is part…
What distinguishes these is what was left in rather than what was taken out. Highly refined sugar tastes of nothing but sweet; everything below tastes of its source. Here are…
Living on water solves specific problems - flooding, defence, access to fishing, land scarcity - and creates others, which is why these settlements share a great deal of engineering despite…
Scripts are usually classified by what a single character represents: a sound, a syllable, a consonant, or a whole word. Almost every design choice below follows from that decision. Here…