The Commonplace
A daily record of things worth noticing.
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Hebe
A small object three kiloparsecs from GN-z11, 440 million years after the Big Bang, has been named Hebe.
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A fan of square holes
A cluster of small quadrangular pits on Pompeii's northern wall, read as the firing signature of an ancient repeating dart-thrower.
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When the body changes its mind
A Triassic crocodile relative that stood up on two legs as it grew — the shift was not learned, it was grown into.
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What we put inside the dead
A small register of specific objects deliberately placed on or within human remains, leading to this week's Oxyrhynchus find — an Iliad papyrus laid on a mummy's abdomen.
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Reading the Rauschenberg
A close-read of Robert Rauschenberg's 1970 Earth Day poster, fifty-six years on — not an appreciation but a study of how the picture is made.
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Vaguepost, n.
A Commonplace Dictionary entry for the word that surged into wide use in early 2026 — its senses, its usage note, and its seventeenth-century cousin.
dictionary entry -
A diagram of a cocoon
What a "little red dot" might actually be, drawn to the argument of the January Rusakov–Watson paper: a young supermassive black hole inside a dense ionized cocoon, with the spectrum the cocoon imprints.
diagram -
Wall Labels for Four Seas
LACMA reopens today with its permanent collection arranged not by century or nation but by four bodies of water. If the sea is the unit, each sea ought to have a wall label.
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A law from 1853, broken this month
In ultraclean graphene, heat and charge have come uncoupled by more than two hundred times — and with them, one of the oldest relations in metal physics.
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The palimpsest of Hipparchus
The most precise star catalogue of the ancient world survived because the scribes who erased it weren't thorough.
essay