In the song "The Election of 1800" in the musical Hamilton, Alexander Hamilton chooses to endorse Thomas Jefferson for president, instead of Aaron Burr. This surprises, Burr, among others, who wonders in the next song why Hamilton chose
Thomas Jefferson, his enemy
A man he’s despised since ...
Please note that I've written my answer as if the question is asking about requiring author tags on questions.
IMHO Author tags should only be used when the question is about the author in relation to their work.
Requiring people to tag every question with the author, or authors, of the wor...
We need meta tags to more easily describe our preferences.
Current mechanism (regular expressions) is not sufficient because related tags (semantic issue) don't have to have related names (syntax issue).
Problems that would be solved by meta tags;
(...) If someone has set up
their filter f...
Having read the current tour the "ask / don't ask" is short an vague. Now I would expect that since we are currently in private beta. However, to me a big definition on scope would be a debate between fiction and non-fiction.
Ask
Specific issues with literature
Real problems or que...
The story of Cadmus and Harmonia as presented in Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson's Greek Gods, is unique in claiming that Harmonia became mortal:
Cadmus wasn’t sure he should be stealing the dragon’s dental work, especially if he was already on Ares’s naughty list, but he did as Athena commanded...
This question is inspired by this article (in Russian) about a website called I Know What You Download. From what I understand, they scan the DHT networks and display torrents that any given IP participated in, and although it is sometimes inaccurate, it can provide data on Internet usage, and th...
In a non-fiction history book, Millenium: A History of the Last Thousand Years, a (temporarily) recurring element is "The Tower of Darkness".
Chapter 3 is even titled that, and it's fairly clearly referring to the Islamic empire or caliph and its rule of a significant portion of Eurasia.
When s...
From To Kill a Mockingbird:
Mr. Radley walked to town at eleven-thirty every morning and
came back promptly at twelve, sometimes carrying a brown paper bag that the
neighborhood assumed contained the family groceries. I never knew how old Mr.
Radley made his living— Jem said he “bought ...
Supposedly Mark Twain once said:
"a gold or silver mine is a hole in the ground with a liar on top".
In the frontier tale "Roughing It", he claims he was almost a millionaire twice, but he sold his shares before the mines hit it rich.
Did this really happen, or is it another case of a tal...
In the interest of not repeating the same mistakes if another book- or literature-related site is proposed: why did Literature Stack Exchange fail? What should we learn from this? How can we avoid repeating the same mistakes?
In the July/August 2012 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, they ran a story entitled "Wearaway and Flambeau" by Matthew Hughes. In it, Hurdevant puts two spells on Raffalon: Ixtlix's Sprightly Wearaway and Chunt's Descending Flambeau. When they are used in combination with a tr...
Like many of Borges's tales, The Library of Babel is meant more as a thought experiment than a realistic story. Don't overthink it.
There's no mention anywhere in the story of where the librarians get food and how they eat - or, for that matter, of how the plumbing for the toilets is operated an...
On my audiobook version, Hannah says the words "I'm sorry" and "Thank you" on sides A and B of tape 7.
Why did she say "I'm sorry" and "Thank you"?
