Back in 2014 I was on a walking tour of Dresden and our guide kept referring to the firebombing destroying this or that building until an American girl in her 20s raised her hand to ask "sorry, who firebombed Dresden?" and the group fell so silent you could hear a pin drop
@mattyglesias
Dresden was rebuilt surprisingly recently
512 reposts · 26K likes · 2.6M views. The most viral post on the timeline. The gap between lived European memory and American historical awareness, compressed into one question.
A riddle from 1688 goes: "If a man born blind can feel the differences between shapes such as spheres and cubes, if given the ability, could he distinguish those objects by sight alone?" In 2003, the riddle was solved when five people had their sight restored through surgery.
2.2K reposts · 62K likes · 4.7M views. Molyneux's Problem — one of philosophy's oldest thought experiments about the relationship between senses, answered empirically. (They couldn't.)
I'm beginning to suspect the old folklore tales and warnings of cave trolls, goblins, and witches originate way older than we think.
@WSJ · The Wall Street Journal
Sexual encounters between Neanderthals and ancient humans skewed in one direction — mostly between male Neanderthals and female humans
214 reposts · 4.3K likes · 611K views. The speculation: folklore monsters as deep-time cultural memory of inter-species encounters.