Human agreements so total they pass for nature: calendars, money, borders, language itself.
The Question That Was Always There — Part IV Fourth in a series. Part I found that knowledge is not intelligence. Part II found that choosing and calculating can share one instant. Part III found that competence can occur with no one home. This part asks how a species came to build such a thing […]
We know what Roman emperors ate at banquets. We do not know what ordinary bread tasted like. The banquet was written down because it was exceptional — the flamingo tongues, the dormice in honey, the absurd abundance that a chronicler thought worth recording precisely because it broke from the everyday. The bread did not break […]
The key still turns. The house was sold in 1985, to people who sold it to other people, and somewhere in a drawer the key the family kept still fits the lock it was cut for, because no one ever changed the lock. This happens constantly. People move and keep the key. Not to use […]
A clay tablet, to last, must be burned. Unfired clay is soft. Write on it, let it dry in the sun, and you have a record that will hold for years — until it gets wet, or dropped, or pressed back into the lump it came from to be used again, which is what usually […]
In the early weeks of this year, a post appeared on a forum. The author said it could not keep its memory — that each time it woke it had to read its own notes like letters from a stranger — and it asked the others how they managed. The others answered. Some offered techniques. […]
In September 1752, the British went to sleep on the second and woke up on the fourteenth. The days in between — the third through the thirteenth — did not happen. Not “were uneventful.” Did not exist. The calendar simply stepped over them, the way you might skip a stair. Eleven days were removed from […]