Blog Category
In-depth guides, thoughtful frameworks, and practical advice to help you read better and grow through books.
8
Articles
0.1h
Avg Read
4.9
Rating
3.1k
Readers
9 min read
Reading GuidesThe board in most Western toy shops is Kalah, an American game from the 1940s. The family it borrows from is far older and far more interesting: Oware, Olinda Keliya, Pallanguzhi, Omweso, Bao. Here is what separates them, a comparison table, and the order to learn them in.
6 min read
Reading GuidesThe boards came out of the royal graves at Ur in the 1920s and nobody could play them for sixty years. What unlocked the game was a cuneiform tablet. Here is the playable reading of that tablet, the board drawn to its real shape, and an honest line between what is archaeology and what is a scholar's reading.
6 min read
Reading GuidesThree thousand years of play, boards in the graves of kings, and then the rules vanished. What survives is the board and five marked squares. Here is what is fact, what is reconstruction, where the two main reconstructions disagree — and a complete playable version you can set up with coins and lolly sticks.
5 min read
Reading GuidesRoman soldiers did not invent hopscotch. Chinese checkers is German. The morris board at Kurna is real and its date is not. Seven origin stories that get repeated everywhere, and what the sources actually say.
4 min read
Reading GuidesDudeney set it in 1902 as a joke — he did not have an answer. It turned out to be one of the most elegant dissections in mathematics, and it hinges. Here is the construction, in his own words, and what is still unproven about it.
4 min read
Reading GuidesStroke order in Hangul is not decoration — it is what makes handwriting legible and what makes a dictionary lookup work. Here is the rule that covers most of it, the letters that are genuinely contested, and how to tell which is which.
5 min read
Reading GuidesMost mythology shelves are eighty per cent Greek. Here are the other eighteen traditions, one story each to begin with, and why that story rather than another.
2 min read
Reading GuidesThree small questions that work better than any best-seller list for picking the next thing you'll actually finish: what's been on your mind, what's the last book you didn't finish, and how much attention do you have right now?
Better reading. Better thinking. Better living.
