Reading Roulette

Stories to Help You Time Travel Away From 2020

This week: Beyoncé, the Unabomber, and an unidentified lord

Photo: Georgi Kostadinov

At Human Parts, we spend our days scouring the Medium platform for essays and perspectives we think our audience would love. Along the way, we stumble upon countless stories that surprise us — proof of the internet’s enduring ability to deliver what we didn’t know we needed. Each week, we’ll share a few of our favorites in a roundup we call ‘Reading Roulette.’ If you come across anything we missed, let us know in the responses!

• Coronavirus has many of us reflecting on plagues of yore. What would our great, great, great, great, great (etc.) ancestors tell us about pandemic life? Probably a lot — we just wouldn’t understand most of it. Read Kathy Copeland Padden on the evolution of a language in “How Far Back in Time Could a Modern English Speaker Go and Still Communicate?”
• In the year 10 B.C. (Before Corona), Lady Gaga and Beyoncé joined forces to bring us Bugaboo 2.0, “Telephone.” Now, a decade after its release, Sydney Urbanek goes deeper than we thought possible on what Lady Gaga once called her worst song in “The Strange Case of ‘Telephone’.”
• When Alyssa Abraham discovered a series of undated, unsigned letters in Italy — they were addressed to “Your Most Illustrious Lordship” (!) — she embarked on a mission to put a date to the documents. In “How I Determined the Date of a 17th-Century Manuscript,” she takes us on her surprising (and successful) quest for answers.
• Presented without comment: 7 Phrases About the Elder Gods that the Women in Your Life are Tired of Hearing, by DC Inspo.
• You can now watch Ted Kaczynski tell his story for the first time in Netflix’s In His Own Words… or you can read Jørgen Veisdal, who walks us through the Unabomber’s brief career in mathematics.