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July 2026

The Other Man Who Saw It
Companion essay to the Arcanum World video "The Plague That Tried to End the World."
 • Arcanum World
The Kingdom That Turned to Charcoal
In the video, there is a single sentence that I could not stop thinking about long after the script was finished.
 • Arcanum World
The Backup Copy Nobody Thinks to Mention
There’s a reason Dharmasvamin’s 1235 visit to Nalanda didn’t happen in isolation, and the video didn’t have room for it: he was one of hundreds of…
 • Arcanum World
How Ice on Opposite Ends of the Planet Agreed on a Date
There’s a detail the video didn’t have room for, and it changes how you should read everything else in it: for most of the last hundred years…
 • Arcanum World
The Architect Who Read a Dead World's Mail
Buried in the video is a detail I didn’t have room to unpack: at Pylos, one of the Mycenaean palaces destroyed in the Bronze Age Collapse…
 • Arcanum World
What It Looks Like When Rome Actually Mourns a Legion
Six years after three legions were annihilated in the Teutoburg Forest in 9 AD, a Roman commander named Germanicus marched his army back to the site to…
 • Arcanum World
The Year a Serious Physics Journal Proposed a Black Hole Did It
For most of the twentieth century, the leading explanation for Tunguska was the dull, sensible one: a stony asteroid or comet fragment, tens of meters…
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How You Prove a Storm Belongs to the Whole Planet
By the time the sky caught fire on the first of September, 1859, the one thing that might have reported it instantly across an ocean was already dead.
 • Arcanum World

June 2026

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