Skeptophilia

We have an unfortunate tendency to idealize the past. Well, unfortunate is probably the wrong word.  I don't guess it does any real har...

I picked up a copy of John Julius Norwich's A Short History of Byzantium  (at almost four hundred pages, it's only short by comparis...

One of the coolest things about science is the cross-fertilization that happens between disciplines. I'm always impressed when I see exa...

It's always thin ice to make too many assumptions about why our distant ancestors did what they did. Most of the time, all we have is th...

I've mentioned before how much I love a good mystery, and there's a hell of a good one underneath the town of Margate, Kent, England...

It's a point I've made before, but it's worth saying again: we queer folks are not  "pushing our lifestyle in other people...

The phenomenally silly song "St. Brendan's Fair Isle," by the Arkansas folk singer and songwriter Jimmy Driftwood , tells the ...

A year and a half or so ago I wrote a piece about some of the biblical apocrypha -- books and epistles and letters and whatnot that didn...

Last year I did a post about the remarkable Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus , whose passion for history (coupled with an u...