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Nathan Lewis • Gold: The Once and Future Money (Agora Series)
Julius Caesar, for example, was the first living person whose head featured on a coin minted in Rome.
Mary Beard • SPQR
words, figures of speech, and playful alliteration.
Steven Pinker • The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century
Amusing Ourselves to Death
Jazmine West • 14 cards
Within the Eurasian lucky latitudes, countless innovations not only arose but also diffused throughout the long east-west band. The lucky latitudes shared a common and relatively hospitable climate, transport routes, and the absence or low intensity of tropical vector-borne diseases such as malaria, though bubonic plague was episodically transporte
... See moreJeffrey D. Sachs • The Ages of Globalization: Geography, Technology, and Institutions
While some old media do, in fact, disappear (e.g., pictographic writing and illuminated manuscripts) and with them, the institutions and cognitive habits they favored, other forms of conversation will always remain. Speech, for example, and writing. Thus the epistemology of new forms such as television does not have an entirely unchallenged influen
... See moreNeil Postman • Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
The maps of the world drawn by the medieval cartographers were so hopelessly inaccurate, so filled with factual error, that they elicit condescending smiles today when almost the entire surface of the earth has been charted. Yet the great explorers could never have discovered the New World without them. Nor could the better, more accurate maps of t
... See moreAlvin Toffler • Future Shock
Each letter in the English language has its own unique personality, which includes its frequency and its relation to other letters. It is this personality that allows us to establish the true identity of a letter, even when it has been disguised by monoalphabetic substitution.
Simon Singh • The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography
Aux alentours de 1455, un orfèvre allemand du nom de Johannes Gutenberg quitta Strasbourg,