Watch: What Bertrand Russell wanted you to know. The legendary thinker has a message for you. Two messages, actually. Here they are.– Willis
Investigate: Medieval murders. Emma Rose, wife of John de Langethwayt, died prematurely in 1359 in York, England, after being stabbed by a thwytel, a kind of dagger. The jury found that her husband, a sadler, was responsible. Did he face justice? Learn about ancient murders and their judicial outcomes with the University of Cambridge’s new Medieval Murder Maps for London, Oxford, and York. – Tracy
Read: “Fatelessness.” In the thick of it I felt a bit like laughing, in part out of astonishment and confusion, a sense of having been dropped slap in the middle of some crazy play.” That’s how the teenage narrator of Nobel-prize winner Imre Kertész’s novel “Fatelessness” describes being whisked out of Budapest and thrown into … Auschwitz. The amused teenage perspective captures perfectly the terrible bewilderment of Central Europe’s bourgeois assimilated Jews, who suddenly found themselves in camps, facing death alongside the backward “shtetl Jews,” whom they had always looked down upon. “Fatelessness,” partly autobiographical, is a bleak and unexpectedly humorous meditation on free will, complicity, and fate. – Alex
Listen: Hàn Gắn. I just caught this Vietnamese-inspired psychedelic post-punk duo at the Pocket here in DC and was blown away. Run a bath and treat yourself to a mid-week soak while listening to their deceptively complex instrumentals.– Matt
