CGP Grey
5 HN recommenders · recommended in 8 months, 2021–2025
21:32 · 10M views · Sep 9, 2021
CGP Grey tells the story of Alexander Pope's long takedown of a historian, Thomas Hearne, framed around the quirks of library books and archival research. It is a funny, digressive video essay about literary feuds and tracking down original sources.
HN commenters point to it as a masterpiece of humorous archival detective work and a great watch about books and libraries.
10 comments from Hacker News
For a really great video mostly about checking out books from a library watch this: this video I found it pretty funny that hundreds of years later he unearthed an old written feud that ended up directly affecting him in a way which caused him to empathize with one of the sides.
To see this gloriously realised, check out CGP Grey's description of Pope's feud with Thomas Hearne. Linking the full video because it's a masterpiece this video
> This one’s notable in that it puts an entire passage in quotes, but it turns out the passage was not in Cheung (1983) at all—not on page 8 or anywhere else in that article—it actually came from a collection from 1998 of old Harvard Business School exam questions. One of my pet peeves is the chain of citations that will inevitably spawn from this. No author can be bothered to go find the original source and just cite that, so this inaccurate (and since retracted) quote will end up propagating itself for decades if not centuries, with each author citing the work that they got the story from. Eventually, hundreds of years from now, someone will be crazy enough to try to work their way down the chain to track down the original, only to discover it isn't there. For an excellent and humorous example, see CGP Grey's search for the original Tiffany: this video
Very cool. If you're interested in things like this you might wanna checkout CGP Grey's videos on tracking down various stories from books through archives. this video
If you enjoyed this, you might also enjoy two videos from CGP Grey: - The Race to Win Staten Island ( [LINK] ) - Someone dead ruined my life... again ( this video )