"The x day of July...ther ded in London mony marchants and grett ryche men and women, and yonge men and old, of the new swett."

- From the diary of English merchant Henry Machyn,
recording the arrival of the English Sweating Sickness in London, July 1551.

"Both victor and vanquished
are but drops of dew -
but bolts of lightning –
thus should we view the world."

- Death poem of Japanese warlord Ōuchi Yoshitaka,
composed just prior to his death by seppuku, September 30, 1551.

In the year AD 1551...

• The fifth and final outbreak of the mysterious English Sweating Sickness breaks out in Shrewsbury and spreads across England, killing tens of thousands before vanishing forever, never to return. The disease takes the heaviest toll on

The past dozen years of American politics (and to a large extent, of world politics) have been marked by populism, and it has been a failure in every way imaginable. It started with conservative politics in 2010, with The Tea Party, and in leftist politics in 2011, with Occupy Wall Street, and since then, it has been doubling down on failure. It has been a failure because it has not produced any better understanding of society and policy, it has been a failure because its allowed people who are

D'ya not know what a clitic is? Let's explore together then we'll both know.

"a word that is treated in pronunciation as forming a part of a neighboring word and that is often unaccented or contracted. "
—Merriam-Webster dictionary

from Greek ἐγκλιτικός enklitikós "leaning" or "enclitic", a clitic refers to a morpheme that functions like a word, but never appears as an independent word, instead being