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The heat’s been brutal this summer but we still gotta eat! If you’re like me, heat might suppress your appetite, and the last thing any of us want is to sweat over a hot stove and oven when it’s already boiling outside. Here are some of my favorite hot-weather recipes to keep hydrated and fed with when the weather is unbearable! (All recipes should be un-paywalled).

NYT’s best gazpacho (lives up to its name!!)

Persian cold cucumber soup (if you like tzatziki you will like this!)

Eric Kim’s cold noodles with tomato (infinitely riffable Korean flavor profile — for a creamier and less brothy take, try these cold sesame noodles too)

Vietnamese chicken and herb salad (this is an excellent time to get a rotisserie chicken so you don’t have to turn the oven on)

Radish sandwiches with butter and salt (and in a similar vein, if you dig this flavor combo you should try this Polish cottage cheese dip on some good rye bread or even crackers)

It’s still a little early in the season, but you can never go wrong with a BLT (or, if you don’t eat bacon, try this tomato furikake sandwich in its place)

Infinite iterations of pasta salad! You can use anything you got but here is a template I like.

Assorted dense bean salads. This back pocket canned salad is a weird combo of jarred ingredients but it slaps, this hoagie-inspired one is super satisfying, and cowboy caviar is a classic for a reason.

Poke bowls! Canned tuna mixed with some kewpie mayo and sriracha is a budget-friendly riff on the usual ahi and makes everything taste like a spicy tuna roll, but use whatever proteins you like, this is more of a loose template.

The Spring 2026 issue of Manuscript Studies (vol. 11.1) is now available in Open Access!

We are pleased to announce the latest issue of Manuscript Studies: A Journal of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies. The journal is published semi-annually by SIMS and the University of Pennsylvania Press. All content from this and from previous issues is available for reading and download, completely free of charge, via the Project Muse platform. Follow the link to access the full issue:

The Spring 2026 issue features the following Articles, Annotations, and Reviews:

Articles:

Indic-Siamese Bitexts and Ayutthaya Scribal Culture: Exposition and Exegesis in Three Kham Luang Manuscripts

Tossaphon Sripum, Trent Walker

Through an analysis of the intricate layouts, scripts, and color-coding of three bilingual Thai Buddhist manuscripts, this study reveals how these distinct scribal choices were deployed strategically to distinguish exposition from exegesis and to map the structure of court poetry in visual terms.

“These Lots Never Deceive”: Compiling and Reading the Latin Manuscripts of the Sortes sanctorum

Bruno Schalekamp

By exploring the intricate compilation and reception history of the popular late-antique dice divination text known as the Sortes sanctorum (“lots of the saints”), this article details how the work could serve as a useful pastoral and secular tool for navigating fraught decisions in everyday life.

Of Catalogs, Cupboards, and Chemists: Revising the Handlist of the Ordinal of Alchemy

Lisa H. Cooper

This paper untangles a century of bibliographic misunderstandings and cataloging oversights that have obscured the material history of Thomas Norton’s 1477 Middle English poem, the Ordinal of Alchemy. It includes a newly revised handlist of forty-eight known witnesses of the text.

Adventures in the Animal Archive: New Techniques for the Genetic Analysis of Parchment Manuscripts

Timothy L. Stinson, Melissa K. R. Scheible, Rachael Thomas, Nicholas E. Wagner, Matthew Breen, Benjamin J. Callahan, Kelly Meiklejohn

This piece summarizes an interdisciplinary study that deployed a new and entirely non-destructive brush procedure to extract animal DNA from ninety-one historical manuscripts held at Duke University. The project report shows how parchment can serve as a repository of biological data concerning medieval agricultural history, livestock economies, and trade routes.

Annotations:

Medieval Manuscripts in Marsh’s Library: An Unintended Collection in Dublin’s First Public Library

Laura Cleaver, Danielle Magnusson, Isabel Tookey

By examining the correspondence and acquisition records of Dublin's oldest public library, this article reveals how personal motivations, unexpected opportunities, and historical coincidences led to the accidental preservation of a small but valuable collection of twenty-three medieval codices.

Reviews:

Tributes to Elly Miller: Opening Manuscripts ed. by Stella Panayotova, Lucy Freeman Sandler and Tamar Miller Wang (review)

Anne Rudloff Stanton

Producing Buddhist Sutras in Ninth-Century Tibet: The Sutra of Limitless Life and Its Dunhuang Copies Kept at the British Library by Brandon Dotson and Lewis Doney (review)

George A. Keyworth

Experimental Histories: Interpolation and the Medieval British Past by Hannah Weaver (review)

Raluca L. Radulescu

Making Books in Fifteenth-Century Cambridge: William Dyngley’s Patristic Project by Ann Eljenholm Nichols (review)

Mimi Ensley

Florentine Humanistic Manuscripts: Revised and Enlarged List from Albinia C. de la Mare, New Research (1985) by Giovanna Murano (review)

Francesco Marco Aresu

The Codex Borbonicus Veintena Imagery: Visualizing History, Time, and Ritual in Aztec Solar-Year Festivals by Catherine R. DiCesare (review)

Lori Boornazian Diel

The Ottoman Scientific Heritage by Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu (review)

Kloster Lüne, from 1172 to the protestant reformation a Benedictine nunnery, now a Lutheran women's convent.

The site sits near Søften in eastern Jutland, about 10 kilometers north of modern Aarhus. Excavations by the Moesgaard Museum show a planned production area instead of a normal farming village. The settlement covered at least 100,000 square meters. Most of the work focused on making textiles, though other forms of handwork also took place there.

I HIGHLY recommend the whole series but also you can use his library of "leads" to explore the Youtube Recycle Bin yourself and I've done that a lot and it's SO fun

The internet is so vast, much more expansive than algorithms will ever show you. This really reminds me of wandering around randomly on Google Earth. It's possible to experience so much of the world it's kind of mind boggling.

I've been keeping a collection of my favorite youtube recycle bin finds.

also there's at least more kinds of sports than I thought existed.

and also everywhere people are dancing. and they're usually not very good at it but that's okay

at the club in some eastern european country judging by the cyrillic text

guy in some kind of cosplay with a gas mask dancing

dance show, looks like students, cyrillic text again. pink panther theme? then party rockers in the house tonight?

guy plays drums on buckets and trashcans (interesting)

guy rapping but you cant hardly hear him because of wind blowing over the microphone. im amazed by the video quality being so good and the audio quality being so bad

brief ambience in a bar

dancing (pretty good)

on stage monologue in language i don't understand

more dancing

no idea what this is

furries dancing on the roof of a building to a furry related song

unfamiliar kind of music. I've never seen instruments like these before. there are poles you beat against the ground and pipes that you slap with a flat implement. it sounds really cool though.

disco music with a guy with a really bad wig

low quality video at a rave or something

driving terrifyingly thru snow somewhere in eastern europe i think

riding in a boat along a canal with dilapidated buildings with graffiti right up to the waters edge very interesting

truck sports somewhere in like, saudi arabia or nearby

Fish market. they are VERY fresh you can tell by the fact they're still flopping

riding a four wheeler in some kind of savanna like environment in the darkness

boat on a lush waterway nice ambience

Some kind of technology being demonstrated. would be really interested to learn what is being shown here

guys inside of a mine?

view out the window of a train near a gigantic city

unfamiliar sport where you hit eachother with sticks balancing on a beam

Guy walks under a bridge appears to be singing to himself the word "homeless"

early morning city ambience really vibey

another peaceful city ambience out a window

night time video out of the window in a city

oceanside city ambience

people in knight armor hitting each other with sticks

Pole dance routine by a dude dressed as a gladiator

Thunderstorm ambience in a city.

Beatboxing battle

Possibly a hotel or something? Backrooms vibes, empty and eerie.

Breakdancing, multiple boys show off their dancing. the breakdancing vids were some of the favorite stuff I found

pocket full of scam by "clowns against corruption"

A video of driving down a road in the darkness that was somehow captivating to view as a kind of short horror film because of the drawn out and distorted audio.

I don't think this pipe should be doing that.

Really cool dance routine called "Symbiosis"

A mascot bee at what looks like a child's birthday party dances to a song that seems...slightly inappropriate for a child's birthday party. definitely on e of my top 5 finds

Snow over apartments. IMMACULATE vibe.

Dance contest between Spider-Men

Unfamiliar music, not sure what he's saying but i love the enrgy

Captivating video of a machine that makes those plastic cartons blueberries come in. the SOUNDS it is so satsfying

POV of a person barely maintaining control of a bike as she rides it down a brick street, making noises of fear and apprehension

immaculate Backrooms vibe. I would love to find more like this.

Another breakdancing competition. My brother and i fascinatedly watched all nine minutes of this. One of my top finds

A beautiful cow investigates a shrine. love the energy of this video

Guy dressed as an egg or possibly the kool aid man silently flailing

A short film about a printer that tries to seduce a guy. Surprisingly well done

Indian rave

Chinese dance contest. Some similarities to breakdancing but not sure exactly what it is, seems like an eclectic mix.

I have no idea what kind of place this is. Maybe a casino? Looks almost like a pro wrestling outfit but he's playing a trumpet

military/police training? paintball? No idea what's going on here but I've found a number of vids like this

I am WILDLY impressed at how many bricks this person can balance on their head

I have this one saved as "no party like an Eastern European party." I have a lot of drunk people in my collection but these gotta be some of the drunkest

Booed at the slam poetry

But exploring the internet randomly, using these "leads" to find random videos, it is much more representative of the real world. You can see city streets, buildings, music and dances from everywhere, hear many different languages being spoken, and see all kinds of unfamiliar things that the algorithms would not have shown you.

I realize it is important to see them, to go against the propaganda that warps our minds.

If you are in USA TV and media will never ever show you the real everyday life of people in most countries of the world. but the internet in theory could have the power to unite everyone

It is also really striking how vast and unexplored the internet is. Did you know everything uploaded to Youtube was used to train AI models? All these fragments of real life and real art, languishing in obscurity, shoveled into the slop machine to make slop.

I mostly used "MVI [any four random digits]" as my lead when searching. It gives a lot of older (10+ years old) videos. It is a video camera of some kind.

There are so many dances in the world. So many! So many ways to dance. All over the world, everyone loves to dance, sing, and play music.

As someone from a hot country that's regularly on fire, here's some tips:

WATER IS YOUR FRIEND! WATER! IS! YOUR! FRIEND! You can transfer SO much heat into this bad boy! You cannot cool down without water!

Wrists under the cold tap. Splash your face and the back of your neck. Fan yourself.

In some countries you can buy a little handeld fan with a water sprayer.

Damp tea towel around the neck. Stick an ice pack in there on hotter days.

Half fill a water bottle with water, stick in freezer. If you use a bottle with a straw, make sure it's lying on its side with the straw side up and out of the water. When frozen top up the rest of the way with tap water and off you go.

Desperate to cool off? Wet T-shirt. Sit in front of a fan. This will nuke it, just don't get hypothermia and don't fall asleep like this.

Cold showers are also your friend in summer. Some people get psyched up by these. Personally, I sleep like a baby, so I'm good to have them before bed. Just keep in mind that it takes a bit of time for the cool to circulate, so your body will tell you that you're colder than you actually are. I find that when I have cold showers I need to step out of the spray when I think I'm cold... I'll just wait, and thirty seconds later the temperature has evened out and I actually need to step under again. Rinse and repeat until you maintain coolness even after stepping out for a bit.

If you can't do cold showers, turn the cold shower on anyway and just stick your arms under. When they're cold, lift your arms up above your head. The sensation of cool blood draining into your body is fucking weird and kinda unpleasant but less unpleasant than being hot.

Feet in a tub of water with ice. Blood naturally flows to your extremities when hot, so take advantage of this. If you don't have a tub of ice water, sticking a wet rag on your feet in front of the fan works too, it's the less powerful version of the wet T-shirt.

Drinks lots of water but make sure that water has electrolytes as well. Stay in the shade.

Keep air circulating. Fans don't actually cool rooms down, they just help transfer heat from your body to the moisture on your skin or the air via evaporative cooling.

Block north facing windows early in the morning so the sun doesn't get in. If you're in the northern hemisphere, this is opposite for you. Keep in mind that if your home is brick, the bricks will still heat up and slowly release heat into your home even after the sun goes down so this will only do so much.

If it's hotter inside than outside, close all your windows but two, making sure they're on opposite sides of the house/unit you're in. Point a fan out of one window, making sure that the doors between the rooms with the open windows are all open. This will help create a mini pressure system in your home, pulling cooler air in and pushing the hotter air out via the fan. Bonus points if you can get that fan high up where the hot air rises; even within a single room the top is much hotter than the air by the floor. Adjust the amount of open windows based on how many fans you have, but generally you want more windows with fans open than windows without fans to keep the pressure correct.

Obviously, use your common sense for these. Not everything WILL work for you, just use the stuff that does and adjust what needs to be adjusted. Some of these will be impossible to use in the workplace but others you can still use. Others are best used at home. If humidity impacts your ability to use any of these, get a dehumidifier if that's an option, or use more ice instead of evaporation.

if you put potatoes in your medieval european style fantasy world people will by and large not find it jarring and accept it as a normal fantasy trope

if you put, say, black people in your medieval european style fantasy world a whole demographic of people will get very angry and accuse you of breaking their immersion