From the category archives:

Tales and Legends

Devouring Dead

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Let Me Count the Ways (To Tell This Tale)

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By Robin Maxwell.
The story of Romeo and Juliet has been re-jigged a hundred different ways—from Broadway musicals to operas to ballets. Most recently, director Baz Luhrmann’s popular feature film starred Leonardo DiCaprio as Romeo and Claire Danes as Juliet. What I didn’t know till recently was that Shakespeare’s play was not the first. Far [...]

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The King of the Lobby

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The Pharaoh’s Underwear

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By Daniel Meyerson
The king’s underwear or a historical document–what was in those chests?
Like a river branching into many streams, there are endless fascinating side issues related to Howard Carter’s discovery of King Tut’s tomb. Take the chests supposedly containing Tut’s underwear: when Carter first opened them he took the folded linen inside for [...]

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Decades-Long Pregancies?

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By Holly Tucker
Putting aside all modesty, let me scream and shout to you my excitement about a feature article that just came out in the New Scientist, one of my favorite magazines.
I uncovered this story several years ago as I was writing a book on early pregnancy and childbirth. I tried and tried to [...]

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Do Mandrakes Really Scream?

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Do Mandrakes Really Scream? This was a question that the National Library of Medicine posed in their magnificent “Magic and Medicine in Harry Potter” exhibit awhile back. The exhibition takes a close look at the facts, fictions, and legends in references to the healing arts in Harry Potter. Very nicely done.
By the way, [...]

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Holy Foreskin!

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By David Farley
When I first heard about the Holy Foreskin, I thought—like a lot of people—it was a joke, either the title of a foreskin fetish magazine or something straight from the mind of a perverted Batman fan.
I’d majored in history—focusing on the medieval and Renaissance periods in Europe—and I had a particular interest [...]

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