On the heels of last week's news of a clothing-optional book signing in Vermont, comes this great theory from the sages at BoingBoing.net: underwear created literacy. According to Dr Marco Mostert, a historian at Utrecht University, an increase in discarded underpants (itself primarily the result of folks moving to the big city where underwear was the custom) made cloth-based paper cheaper than the earlier parchment, and thus reading material was more widely available than ever before to the huddled, jockeyed masses.Follow this link to see more on the story and a picture of what medieval underwear looked like.--David E
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