Atlantic looks at the latest efforts to decode the inscrutable Voynich manuscript

What has roughly 38,000 words over 234 pages and yet is not just unreadable but indecipherable? The ancient Voynich manuscript, of course, which just might be "history's hardest puzzle," writes Ariel Sabar in the Atlantic. Cryptographers, mathematicians, and linguists have been trying to decode the 15th-century text, which is accompanied by funky illustrations, ever since rare-books dealer Wilfrid Voynich acquired it in 1912 and brought it to the world's attention. It's now in the hands of Yale. Plenty of theories have emerged over the years -- a health manuscript, perhaps? -- but none that have satisfied leading scholars. Sabar's story recounts all of this but also details how one of those medieval scholars, Lisa Fagin Davis, has been examining the manuscript through a different lens.