The great European composers of the 1600s and 1700s are well known: Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and their colleagues. But there was another, possibly a master of more genres than the others, and whose genius was widely acknowledged at the time. And this composer was a woman, at a time when women were hardly ever educated.… Continue reading

Good morning! The Irish Literary Theatre and the Abbey Theatre were (the Abbey still is) cultural icons in Ireland. They were both founded around the turn of the 20th Century when leading Irish writers and playwrights pushed for what’s still known as the Irish Literary Revival. The Irish Literary Theatre was the first; it was… Continue reading

If you visit Paris, you might stop by Shakespeare and Company, a famous (really famously-named) bookstore frequented, back in the day, by writers including Ezra Pound, James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway. The store you visit has the same name as the famous venue, and although it’s a very pleasant shop,… Continue reading

Despite lots of progress in diversity, there are still some professions in which women are enormously underrepresented. One of them is automobile racing. Although there aren’t any restrictions against female drivers, and women may even be more physically suited to the sport, there have been very few women racing drivers. One exception, and one of… Continue reading

March 12 is Tammy Duckworth’s 56th birthday. She was born in Bangkok, Thailand. Her father was from the US, and her mother was Thai. Although she was born in Bangkok, her father worked for the United Nations in refugee housing and development, and the family moved frequently throughout Southeast Asia. As a child, Duckworth became… Continue reading

If you ever use that World Wide Web thing, you should give a tip of your hat to Vannevar Bush, who was born March 11 1890. He was an engineer, inventor, and writer, and evidently an extremely capable administrator in both government and the private sector. Although he didn’t invent it, exactly, he wrote the… Continue reading

If you’re going to power an airplane with an internal combustion engine, you’re going to have some obstacles to overcome. This is particularly true when the airplane is designed to do aerobatic moves rather than just fly straight and level. In some maneuvers the airplane will experience “negative-g” — that is, it will be effectively… Continue reading

Imagine that you managed to qualify for and enroll in a top university despite all sorts of obstacles having been put in your way. You attend your first class, in a specialty you’re very talented in: math. And there, in your first class, on your first day, your professor asks you if you wouldn’t be… Continue reading