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🎓 How Locusts Cause Famines and Shaped the Middle East
When there are too many grasshoppers, people starve. A look at Palestinian, Nebraskan, and East African locust swarms.
 • Eleanor Konik
🎓 Discussion Qs on Wealth, Marriage, Education, & Inventors
The relationship between success and money, with side quests into Assyrian marriage contracts and Imperial boarding schools.
 • Eleanor Konik
🎓 When Canals and Bridges Fail Us
Sandstorms, droughts, and big big ships have implications for the carrying capacity of the world. Which is to say: how many people can be alive at once.
 • RobRoy and Eleanor Konik
🎓 When Perseverance Gets People Pointlessly Killed
On Naval Press Gangs, HMS Wager, and Knowing When to Quit
 • Eleanor Konik
🎓 When Royal Marriages Keep Power Inside the Family
How the Egyptians and Ottomans bucked diplomatic marriage trends by marrying their sisters and slaves.
 • Eleanor Konik
🎓 Complaints about immodesty go way back
A discussion of sumptuary laws and clothing critiques, mostly focused on Greco-Roman and Crusader cultures.
 • Eleanor Konik
🎓 Grafting & Growth: On Trees as Infrastructure
The cultural and ecological ingenuity of trees: from living bridges and clothing to natural air conditioners.
 • Eleanor Konik
🎓 On Teleportation & Understanding via Writing
How writing speculative fiction helps me create a mental model of complex concepts.
 • Eleanor Konik
🌲 On Leadership & Legacy: Shockley, Yi, & Brasidas
Lessons from people who failed at a critical thing they were trying to accomplish.
 • Eleanor Konik
🎓 Communities who never met IRL are older than you think
Online friendships are not so very different from the Mesopotamian brotherhood of kings, or the Kula ring of the Trobriand Islanders in the Southwest…
 • Eleanor Konik
🎓 On Agricultural Causes of Societal Catastrophes
A look at maize mosaic disease, wheat rust, the chestnut blight, brown spot disease, and the boll weevil.
 • Eleanor Konik
🎓 On the Diplomacy of Steppe Princesses
How "Wordle meets Wikipedia" expanded my horizons in regard to the importance of noble daughters in Asia, particularly among the Xiongnu.
 • Eleanor Konik
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