The scholar-elite class of dynastic China were not always engrossed in studying or affairs of state. This gourd with ivory-carved lid held live crickets, who were set to fight in staged cricket matches for the amusement of the Chinese intelligentsia. From 19th-century Qing China, the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Trofim Lysenko, the Stalinist-era biologist who tailored his scientific ideas to suit the Soviet communist party. Denying natural selection and arguing that character traits developed…
This is John Tenniel’s famous 1871 illustration of the poem “Jabberwocky,” the most famous nonsense poem in the English language. Linguists have long remarked upon…