Thursday, September 24, 2015

This week’s installment of “OMG what is happening to libraries” comes to you from the Atlantic. In a related story, however, millennials are reading more than earlier generations.

Look, it’s an annotated history of annotations!

Medieval history has been reinvented and reinterpreted over and over in literature, film, and now in video games. A historian talks about what medieval communities were really like (spoiler: there was a good deal of diversity, especially once the Vikings started moving around and adopting local cultures).

The statisticians at FiveThirtyEight calculate how to tell someone’s age from their name. Tangential question, based on one of their charts: does anyone know an older woman (or ancestor) named Willie? I have some Wilheminas in my family tree, but they went by Minnie or Mina. This popularity of “Willie” is a surprise to me.

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