Category: Codebreaking
Connect the dots, solve the riddles, uncover the conspiracies.
Victor Ludi (1): Rhyming Slang
By:
And the winner of the Magister Ludi Rhyming Slang challenge is…
Read This PostSalsa Mahonesa and the Seven Years’ War
By:
Mayonnaise: the sauce that launched a thousand ships.
Read This PostWhat a Tangled Bank We Weave
By:
Darwin’s dangerous idea does more than explain the existence of life in its myriad forms and set forth a materialist worldview that makes Biblical literalists foam at the mouths. It’s also as meme with enormous […]
Read This PostPop Arcana (1)
By:
The RWS Tarot is more like 1900s comic strips than Middle Age esoterica.
Read This PostOf Tablets, Holy Writ, & Holy Grails
By:
. The mere possibility of an impending announcement of a tablet from Apple has tech journalists everywhere abandoning their cynicism for bouts of credulity and wonder. But the sudden zeal with which many commentators anticipate […]
Read This PostQuatschwatch (4): Cuddly Cthulhu
By:
The final paragraph of H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth’s The Lurker at the Threshold (1945) describes an uncanny scene that nicely limns the Cthulhu Mythos for those of us who may as yet be unfamiliar […]
Read This PostWinds of Magic (10): Agent Zimmerman
By:
I had just removed his hand — gently, I hope — from my knee when the man in the off-white linen suit told me that he was the one who recruited Bob Dylan into the […]
Read This PostReverse-engineering the book
By:
As a child, John Carrera was fascinated by the trove of yellowing pages of Webster’s Pictorial Dictionary he found beneath his grandfather’s chair. As a fine-press printer, he has painstakingly brought the book back to […]
Read This PostDouble Exposure (8): Soul Food
By:
A cherubic angel heralds the advent of Minute Maid Heart Wise orange juice, which miraculously — note how the bottle glows — resolves the tension between thesis (“It helps lower cholesterol”) and antithesis (“It tastes […]
Read This Postthe best book ever (results)
By:
I asked you to describe the ideal book, one that would save the publishing world and the public sphere in one stroke. And with responses pouring in — nearly three dozen of them — it's […]
Read This Post