Everyone in ancient Rome wore togas, surrounded themselves with pure-white marble statues, bayed for blood as gladiators fought to the death in the Colosseum, programmatically imitated the Greeks, and, after each and every debaucherous feast, excused themselves to the vomitoria, … | Continue reading
Even today, the Paris of the popular imagination is, for the most part, the Paris envisioned by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann and made a reality in the eighteen-fifties and sixties. Not that he could order the city built whole: as explained by Manuel Bravo in the new video above … | Continue reading
Image by Jules Jacot Guillarmod, via Wikimedia Commons In 2016, we brought you a rather strange story about the rivalry between poet William Butler Yeats and magician Aleister Crowley. Theirs was a feud over the practices of occult society the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn; b … | Continue reading
Each of us has a different idea of when, exactly, the sixties ended, not as a decade, but as a distinct cultural period. Some have a notion of the “long sixties” that extends well into the seventies; if pressed for a specific final year, they could do worse than pointing to 1972, … | Continue reading
You’ve likely heard the reason people never smile in very old photographs. Early photography could be an excruciatingly slow process. With exposure times of up to 15 minutes, portrait subjects found it impossible to hold a grin, which could easily slip into a pained grimace and r … | Continue reading
It may well be that the major pivot points of history are only visible to those around the bend. For those of us immersed in the present—for all of its deafening sirens of violent upheaval—the exact years future generations will use to mark our epoch remain unclear. But when we l … | Continue reading
You could argue that, of all rock bands, that Pink Floyd had the least need for visual accompaniment. Sonically rich and evocatively structured, their albums evolved to offer listening experiences that verge on the cinematic in themselves. Yet from fairly early in the Floyd’s his … | Continue reading
As many as a million people crossed the Golden Gate Bridge on foot to celebrate the 50th anniversary of its construction in 1987. More than a few of them would have remembered San Francisco as it was before it had its most iconic structure — and indeed, some would even remember w … | Continue reading
In addition to the iconic scene in Jim Henson’s Labyrinth, or appearances in animated TV shows and video games, M.C. Escher’s work has adorned the covers of albums like Mott the Hoople’s 1969 debut and the speculative fiction of Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges. A big hit with … | Continue reading
From Red Bull’s YouTube Channel: “Ski mountaineer Andrzej Bargiel becomes the first person to climb Mount Everest and ski back to Everest Base Camp without supplementary oxygen. After nearly 16 hours climbing in the high altitude “death zone” (above 8,000m where oxygen levels are … | Continue reading
Everywhere you look, you can find traces of the ancient Roman civilization from which the modern West descends. That’s especially true if you happen to be looking in Europe, though echoes of Latin make themselves heard in major languages used all over the world. Take, for example … | Continue reading
To imagine ourselves into the time of Leonardo da Vinci, we must first imagine a world without such things as helicopters, parachutes, tanks, diving suits, robots. Yet those all existed for Leonardo himself — or rather, they existed in his imagination. What he didn’t build in rea … | Continue reading
Rings with a discreet dual purpose have been in use since before the common era, when Hannibal, facing extradition, allegedly ingested the poison he kept secreted behind a gemstone on his finger. (More recently, poison rings gave rise to a popular Game of Thrones fan theory…) Vic … | Continue reading
From the mighty Maya civilization, which dominated Mesoamerica for more than three and a half millennia, we have exactly four books. Only one of them predates the arrival of Spanish conquistadors in the sixteenth century: the Códice Maya de México, or Maya Codex of Mexico, which … | Continue reading
In the whole of Alien, the titular entity only appears on screen for about three minutes. That’s one reason the movie holds up so well against the other creature features of its era: in glimpses, you never get a chance to register signs of the alien’s being an artificial construc … | Continue reading
Marlon Brando has now been gone for more than two decades, and so thoroughgoing was his impact on the art of film acting that younger generations of movie-lovers may have trouble pinning down what, exactly, he did so differently on screen. In the new video above, Evan “Nerdwriter … | Continue reading
Look up the word architecture in the dictionary, and though you won’t actually find a picture of Frank Lloyd Wright, it may feel as if you should. Or at least it will feel that way if you’re looking in an American dictionary, given that Wright has been regarded as the personifica … | Continue reading
In 1957, the BBC program Panorama aired one of the first televised April Fools’ Day hoaxes. Above, you can watch a faux news report from Switzerland narrated by respected BBC journalist Richard Dimbleby. Here’s the basic premise: After a mild winter and the “virtual disappearance … | Continue reading
Certain cult historical figures have served as prescient avatars for the techno-visionaries of the digital age. Where the altruistic utopian designs of Buckminster Fuller provided an ideal for the first wave of Silicon Valley pioneers (a group including computer scientist and phi … | Continue reading
Michael Jackson’s Thriller is the best-selling album of all time, and not by a particularly slim margin. The most recent figures have it registered at 51.3 million copies, as against the 31.2 million notched by the runner up, AC/DC’s Back in Black. But it would surely be a closer … | Continue reading
Of the many readings and adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe’s classic moody-broody poem “The Raven,” none is more fun than The Simpsons’, in which Lisa Simpson’s intro transitions into the reading voice of James Earl Jones and the slapstick interjections of Homer as Poe’s avatar and … | Continue reading
Apart from certain stretches of absence, Leonardo’s Mona Lisa has been on display at the Louvre for 228 years and counting. Though created by an Italian in Italy, the painting has long since been a part of French culture. At some point, the reverence for La Joconde, as the Mona L … | Continue reading
To many longtime fans, there are — at the very least — two Pink Floyds. The first is the rock band that in 1965 took the name the Pink Floyd Sound, an invention of its newest member Syd Barrett. A guitar-playing singer-songwriter, the young Barrett soon became the group’s guiding … | Continue reading
American is a tricky word. It can refer to everyone and everything of or pertaining to all the countries of North America — and potentially South America as well — but it’s commonly used with specific regard to the United States. For Frank Lloyd Wright, linguistic as well as arch … | Continue reading
We all know the manchild Mozart of Milos Forman’s 1984 biopic Amadeus. As embodied by a manic, braying Thomas Hulce, the precocious and haunted composer supposedly loved nothing more than scandalizing, amusing, or exasperating friends and enemies alike with juvenile pranks and sc … | Continue reading
As an exercise draw a composition of fear or sadness, or great sorrow, quite simply, do not bother about details now, but in a few lines tell your story. Then show it to any one of your friends, or family, or fellow students, and ask them if they can tell you what it is you […] | Continue reading
With Halloween just days away, many of us are even now readying a scary movie or two to watch on the night itself. If you’re still undecided about your own Halloween viewing material, allow us to suggest The Shining, Stanley Kubrick’s “masterpiece of modern horror.” Those words c … | Continue reading
In the graduate department where I once taught freshmen and sophomores the rudiments of college English, it became common practice to include Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus on many an Intro to Lit syllabus, along with a viewing of Julie Taymor’s flamboyant film adaptation. The ea … | Continue reading
In 1949, George Orwell received a curious letter from his former high school French teacher. Orwell had just published his groundbreaking book Nineteen Eighty-Four, which received glowing reviews from just about every corner of the English-speaking world. His French teacher, as i … | Continue reading
If you’ve made the journey to Athens, you probably took the time to visit its most popular tourist attraction, the Acropolis. On that monument-rich hill, you more than likely paid special attention to the Parthenon, the ancient temple dedicated to the city’s namesake, the goddess … | Continue reading
One of my very first acts as a new New Yorker many years ago was to make the journey across three boroughs to Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. My purpose: a pilgrimage to Herman Melville’s grave. I came not to worship a hero, exactly, but—as Fordham University English professor An … | Continue reading
More than a few of us might be interested in the opportunity to spend a day in Victorian London. But very few of us indeed who’ve ever read, say, a Charles Dickens novel would ever elect to live there. “London’s little lanes are charming now,” says Sheehan Quirke, the host of the … | Continue reading
Lake George Reflection (circa 1921) via Wikimedia Commons What comes to mind when you think of Georgia O’Keeffe? Bleached skulls in the desert? Aerial views of clouds, almost cartoonish in their puffiness? Voluptuous flowers (freighted with an erotic charge the artist may not hav … | Continue reading
If you wish to become a cinephile worthy of the title, you must first pledge never to refuse to watch a film for any of the following reasons. First, that it is in a different language and subtitled; second, that it is too old; third, that it is too slow; fourth, that it is too [ … | Continue reading
The practice of cartomancy, or divination with cards, dates back several hundred years to at least 14th century Europe, perhaps by way of Turkey. But the specific form we know of, the tarot, likely emerged in the 17th century, and the deck we’re all most familiar with—the Rider-W … | Continue reading
In 2003, a Salvador Dalí drawing was stolen from Rikers Island, one of the most formidable prisons in the United States. That the incident has never been used as the basis for a major motion picture seems inexplicable, at least until you learn the details. A screenwriter would ha … | Continue reading
On Sunday morning, some audacious thieves stole priceless jewels from the Louvre Museum. The heist took only eight minutes from start to finish. At 9:30 a.m., the robbers parked a truck with a portable ladder in front of the Parisian museum. They ascended the ladder, cut through … | Continue reading
In the eighteenth century, the readers of Europe went mad for epistolary novels. France had, to name the most sensational examples, Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes, Rousseau’s Julie, and Laclos’ Les Liaisons dangereuses; Germany, Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werther and Hölderli … | Continue reading
The names Leo Fender and Les Paul will be forever associated with the explosion of the electric guitar into popular culture. And rightly so. Without engineer Fender and musician and studio wiz Paul’s timeless designs, it’s hard to imagine what the most iconic instruments of decad … | Continue reading
The twenty-first century so far may seem light on major technological breakthroughs, at least when compared to the twentieth. An artificial intelligence boom (perhaps a bubble, perhaps not) has been taking place over the past few years, which at least gives us something to talk a … | Continue reading
We tend to think of the Roman Empire as having fallen around 476 AD, but had things gone a little differently, it could have come to its end much earlier — before it technically began, in fact. In the year 44 BC, for instance, the assassination of Julius Caesar and the civil wars … | Continue reading
The phrase “when Dylan went electric” once carried as much weight in pop culture history as “the fall of the Berlin Wall” carries in, well, history. Both events have receded into what feels like the distant past, but in the early 1960s, they likely seemed equally unlikely to many … | Continue reading
When first we take an interest in movies, we must figure out our own method of deciding what to watch next. The central factor may be box office performance, the presence of a favorite performer, adherence to a favorite genre, or the use of a familiar story from other media. Such … | Continue reading
Nearly 70 percent of Americans believe in angels, at least according to a statistic often cited in recent years. But what, exactly, comes to their minds — or those of any other believers around the world — when they imagine one? Personal conceptions may vary, of course, but we ca … | Continue reading
As scholars of ancient texts well know, the reconstruction of lost sources can be a matter of some controversy. In the ancient Hebrew and less ancient Christian Biblical texts, for example, critics find the remnants of many previous texts, seemingly stitched together by occasiona … | Continue reading
Back in 2015, President Obama joined Marc Maron on the WTF podcast, marking the first time a sitting president took part in this new kind of broadcasting format. It was a watershed moment—a moment when podcasting went mainstream and became, soon enough, a big business. A decade l … | Continue reading
In 1973, Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird’s The Secret Life of Plants became a bestseller. Drawing from the results of scientific studies about whose replicability we may now feel certain doubts, the book suggested that emotion, and indeed sentience, belong not just to humans … | Continue reading
My Penguin Classics copy of Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi sits alone atop an overfull shelf. There is a bookmark on page 204, exactly halfway through, torn from an in-flight duty-free catalog—whiskey and fancy pens. It tells me “hey, you forgot to finish this, you [various … | Continue reading