history
The Lost Civilization of the Indus Valley
It was as large as Egypt and Mesopotamia combined, built on a grid, and we still cannot read its writing. The Indus Valley Civilization is one of the great unsolved puzzles of antiquity.
history
history
The Surprising Origins of Punctuation
The comma is six hundred years older than the dictionary. The question mark might come from a medieval scribe's shorthand for the word 'questio.' Here is the strange history of the marks we use without thinking.
history
The Strange Persistence of QWERTY
The QWERTY keyboard layout was designed for the Sholes typewriter in 1873 to slow typists down. The mechanical reasons disappeared by 1900. The layout is still on every device you own. Why?
history
The Forgotten History of the Library Catalog
Long before databases and search engines, librarians invented the most ambitious metadata system in history. It still shapes how we find things.