Books, film and music
Everything we have published on Books, film and music, newest first. Background, research and plain explanation — not only the headline of the day.
QWERTY Was Not Built to Slow You Down. The Paper Trail Leads to Morse Code and a Patent Dodge.
The jamming story is printed on museum object records and repeated in textbooks. A Kyoto University study of the surviving prototypes found something duller and stranger - telegraph operators, a factory compromise, and a rearrangement made to get around somebody else's patent.
The Bookseller Who Gave a Welsh Town a New Plot
Richard Booth did not rescue Hay-on-Wye with one shop or one stunt. He helped create a cluster, a story and a reason for visitors to stay.
Human-Related Microbes May Survive Moon’s South Pole, NASA Finds
Lee esta historia en español aquí. Some of Earth’s microbes likely to hitch a ride to space with human explorers could survive in the shaded nooks and crannies of the Moon’s South Pole region, NASA sc
One Team Says the Antikythera Mechanism Was More Precise Than We Thought. Another Says It Would Have Jammed.
Both were measuring the same corroded bronze. The disagreement is not really about the machine — it is about what two thousand years on a seabed does to a measurement, and neither paper says what the headlines said it said.
Your Ticket Has a Tax Box. Some of What Sits in It Belongs to the Airline.
The fuel surcharge is a carrier charge with a code of its own, YQ. Japan is the one large market that makes airlines file the formula, and its published number has gone from 29,000 yen to 65,000 and back to 55,000 in seven months.
‘Silence has become both more dangerous and more complicit’: An interview with Lebanese-British artist, Amale Khlat
“In an age when images of war circulate constantly without producing understanding or action, I am interested in the screen that makes you stop.”
Who Saves an Old Video Game When the Shop Disappears?
Games can vanish from sale long before their cultural value fades, leaving archivists to preserve machines, code, magazines and the human story around them.
Why Christopher Nolan turned Circe into a vindictive witch
Some critics have bemoaned the flattening of a complex character. But Nolan’s film echoes a literary tradition of reimagining Circe as a survivor, a truth-teller and a figure of female empowerment.