A difficult childhood and adolescence, saturated with the feeling of being an outsider, may or may not contribute to becoming a great artist. Experiencing the social and cultural ferment of Berlin and Paris in the nineteen-twenties probably wouldn’t hurt one’s chances. Nor, surel … | Continue reading
Even in death we are only limited by our imagination in how we want to go out. There are now ways to turn our corpse into a tree, or have our ashes shot into space, or press our ashes into diamonds–I believe Superman is involved in that last one. And now for the music lover, […] | Continue reading
The animated short above, The Dot and the Line, directed by the great Chuck Jones and narrated by English actor Robert Morley, won an Oscar in 19656 for Best Animated Short Film. Based on a book written by Norton Juster, “The Dot and the Line” tells the story of a romance between … | Continue reading
About a year ago, a certain kind of cinephile took note of obituaries for Ted Kotcheff, a television-turned-film director who worked steadily from the mid-fifties to the mid-nineties. Even to readers only casually acquainted with movies, more than one title pops out from his film … | Continue reading
Under most circumstances, there’s nothing particularly shocking about cutting into an eye removed from a dead animal. Gratuitous, maybe, and surely disgusting for some, but certainly not psychologically damaging. I remember a man turning up one day to my first-grade classroom and … | Continue reading
The Simpsons has mocked or referenced literature over its many seasons, usually through a book Lisa was reading, or with guest appearances (e.g., Michael Chabon & Jonathan Franzen, Maya Angelou and Amy Tan). And it has referenced Edgar Allan Poe in both title (“The Tell-Tale Head … | Continue reading
Just days ago, Haruki Murakami’s Japanese publisher announced that his sixteenth novel will come out this summer. A brief section of The Tale of KAHO, translated into English by Philip Gabriel, appeared in the New Yorker in 2024. The full book will run to 352 pages, making it a f … | Continue reading
Though it may have enjoyed occasional waves of pop-cultural prestige over the years, interior design remains an overlooked art. That is to say, few bother to appreciate, or even to notice, its similarities with other, more “serious” forms of human endeavor. Watch the recent Five … | Continue reading
Paw prints and feline urine stains on a medieval scribe’s manuscript, perhaps they weren’t entirely out of the ordinary in the 15th century. But cats strapped to mini-powder kegs, bounding off to burn down a town — now that’s pretty unusual. The incendiary feline featured above ( … | Continue reading
In a brisk WIRED interview, Professor Tarek Masoud answers frequently asked questions about Iran’s history. He explains that Iran is not an Arab country but a predominantly Persian one, with a distinct language and identity. He traces how the country became an Islamic republic af … | Continue reading
In the world of cryptography, substitution ciphers are child’s play. Indeed, we may remember literally playing with them as children, writing secret messages to our friends by replacing all the letters with numbers, say, or shifting them one or two places over in alphabetical ord … | Continue reading
When we think of modern architecture, we often think first of what’s called the International Style, whose minimalist, rectilinear, decoration-free forms were championed by the likes of Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier. Though they did build projects all … | Continue reading
Above and below, you can watch musicians perform “Songs of Consolation,” a 1,000-year-old song set “to the poetic portions of Roman philosopher Boethius’ magnum opus The Consolation of Philosophy,” an influential medieval text written during the 6th century. According to Cambridg … | Continue reading
We live, as we’re often told, in the era of globalization. In fact, we’ve been told it so often over the past few decades that it now hardly seems like an observation worth making. But however thoroughly our era is defined by connections between far-flung nations, societies, econ … | Continue reading
We live, as we’re often told, in the era of globalization. In fact, we’ve been told it so often over the past few decades that it now hardly seems like an observation worth making. But however thoroughly our era is defined by connections between far-flung nations, societies, econ … | Continue reading
We live, as we’re often told, in the era of globalization. In fact, we’ve been told it so often over the past few decades that it now hardly seems like an observation worth making. But however thoroughly our era is defined by connections between far-flung nations, societies, econ … | Continue reading
A philosopher perhaps more widely known for his prodigious mustache than for the varieties of his thought, Friedrich Nietzsche often seems to be misread more than read. Even someone like Michel Foucault could gloss over a crucial fact about Nietzsche’s body of work: Foucault rema … | Continue reading
Though you may not hear it every day, chimera remains an evocative word, perhaps even more so for its rarity. It descends from the Greek Khimaira, literally “year-old she-goat,” the name of a mythical fire-breathing creature with a caprine body, sure enough, but also the head of … | Continue reading
A curious thing happened at the end of the 19th century and the dawning of the 20th. As European and American industries became increasingly confident in their methods of invention and production, scientists made discovery after discovery that shook their understanding of the phy … | Continue reading
Image via Wikimedia Commons It must come up in every single argument, from sophisticated to sophomoric, about the practicability of non-violent pacifism. “Look what Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. were able to achieve!” “Yes, but what about Hitler? What do you do about the Naz … | Continue reading
The Chinese filmmaker Wang Bing’s ‘Til Madness Do Us Part, a documentary about a mental institution in Yunnan, runs three hours and 48 minutes. Beauty Lives in Freedom, on the life of imprisoned artist Gao Ertai, is five and a half hours long; Dead Souls, on the survivors of a ha … | Continue reading
Image of Ancient Egyptian Dentistry, via Wikimedia Commons When we assume that modern improvements are far superior to the practices of the ancients, we might do well to actually learn how people in the distant past lived before indulging in “chronological snobbery.” Take, for ex … | Continue reading
Americans of a certain age may well remember growing up with an Apple II in the classroom, and the perpetual temptation it held out to play The Oregon Trail, Number Munchers, or perhaps Lode Runner. More than a few recess gamers went on to computer-oriented careers, but only the … | Continue reading
Great swathes of rock music since the nineteen-sixties would never have existed, we’re sometimes told, were it not for the recordings of Robert Johnson. Certainly the likes of Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, Robert Plant, and Bob Dylan have never hesitated to acknowledge his influe … | Continue reading
We’ve lived but a few years so far into the age when artificial intelligence can produce convincing stories, songs, essays, poems, novels, and even films. For many of us, these recently implemented functions have already come to feel necessary in our daily life, but it may surpri … | Continue reading
Simplicity is not the goal. It is the by-product of a good idea and modest expectations. Thus spake designer Paul Rand, a man who knew something about making an impression, having created iconic logos for such immediately recognizable brands as ABC, IBM, and UPS. An example of Ra … | Continue reading
Perhaps you’ve had the experience of moving to a new city and immediately being told that you’ve missed its golden age of live music. To an extent, this has happened in more or less every period of the past fifty or sixty years. But what if the person regaling you with those stor … | Continue reading
After his radical conversion to Christian anarchism, Leo Tolstoy adopted a deeply contrarian attitude. The vehemence of his attacks on the class and traditions that produced him were so vigorous that certain critics, now mostly obsolete, might call his struggle Oedipal. Tolstoy t … | Continue reading
?si=sPXB5teJO7wsm71F The Pacific Palisades fire of January 25 destroyed much of that coastal Los Angeles neighborhood, but it somehow spared the Charles and Ray Eames house. Anyone who’s paid it a visit, or at least pored over the many photos of it in existence, knows that it’s m … | Continue reading
Here in the twenty-twenties, a young reader first hearing of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four would hardly imagine it to be a work of science fiction. That wouldn’t have been the case in 1949, when the novel was first published, and when the eponymous year would have sounded … | Continue reading
Are you feeling confident about the future? No? We understand. Would you like to know what it was like to feel a deep certainty that the decades to come were going to be filled with wonder and the fantastic? Well then, gaze upon this clip from the BBC Archive YouTube channel of s … | Continue reading
We all learn in school, or at least from our more rigorous choices of science fiction, that we’ll never be able to travel faster than the speed of light. At first, this may sound disappointing, but upon reflection, 186,000 miles per second is nothing to sneeze at. Questions about … | Continue reading
No art enthusiast’s visit to the United Kingdom would be complete without days at the British Museum, the Tate, the V&A and the National Gallery. The fact that all those respected institutions are in London constitutes a plausible excuse never to stray outside the capital. But th … | Continue reading
More than a century after women’s suffrage in the United States, it’s not enough to bone up on the platforms of female primary candidates (though that’s an excellent start). A Twitter user and self-described Old Crone named Robyn urged her fellow Americans to take a good long gan … | Continue reading
If monorails have a bad name, The Simpsons may be to blame. In an episode acclaimed for its hilariousness since it first aired 33 years ago, a huckster shows up in Springfield and convinces the town to build just such a transit system, which turns out to be not just suspiciously … | Continue reading
Considering the possibility of a truly proletarian art, the great English literary critic William Empson once wrote, “the reason an English audience can enjoy Russian propagandist films is that the propaganda is too remote to be annoying.” Perhaps this is why American artists and … | Continue reading
When we think of silence, we think of meditative stretches of calm: hikes through deserted forest paths, an early morning sunset before the world awakes, a staycation at home with a good book. But we know other silences: awkward silences, ominous silences, and—in the case of John … | Continue reading
“If Youth, throughout all history, had had a champion to stand up for it; to show a doubting world that a child can think; and, possibly, do it practically; you wouldn’t constantly run across folks today who claim that ‘a child don’t know anything.’ ” Ranked alongside the other n … | Continue reading
Much has been written lately about the crisis in Hollywood, which has left many apparently sure-fire blockbusters floundering, theaters empty, and production jobs lost. There are many factors in play — some of them, as few diagnoses fail to point out, structural — but can we igno … | Continue reading
Not too far back, we revisited some Cold War propaganda that taught upstanding American citizens How to Spot a Communist Using Literary Criticism. It’s a gem, but it has nothing on the 1954 film, The House in the Middle. Selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by … | Continue reading
Asked to name famous shipwrecks at a bar trivia night, a fair few participants might think immediately of Pearl Harbor, whether or not they can recall that it was the USS Arizona bombed there. More firmly within living memory sits the SS Andrea Doria, though she’s hardly the cult … | Continue reading
Very few of us have ever set foot near a genuine medieval castle, especially if we don’t happen to live in Europe. Yet practically all of us still, here in the twenty-first century, refer with some frequency to their components in our everyday speech. When we invoke moats, drawbr … | Continue reading
Among my works, the one I like best is the Home that I have had built in Milan for accommodating old singers not favored by fortune, or who, when they were young did not possess the virtue of saving. Poor and dear companions of my life! —Giuseppe Verdi Is there a remedy for the … | Continue reading
The dark arts of “Hollywood accounting” make it difficult to determine film budgets with precision. But according to reasonable reckonings, James Cameron may have directed not just one but several of the most expensive movies of all time. The underwater sci-fi spectacle that was … | Continue reading
From the 18th century onward, the genres of Gothic horror and fantasy have flourished, and with them the sensually visceral images now commonplace in film, TV, and comic books. These genres perhaps reached their aesthetic peak in the 19th century with writers like Edgar Allan Poe … | Continue reading
Whether or not we believe in any god, most of us here in the twenty-first century have the impression of divine rulers overlooking humanity with at least theoretical love and benevolence. They forgive us, they have plans for us, they never close a door without opening a window, a … | Continue reading
From Yale professor Paul North comes a chapter-by-chapter study of Karl Marx’s Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1. According to the description that accompanies the course on YouTube, this “book from 1872 is still the best guide to the predatory economic and social … | Continue reading
It takes about five hours to drive from Düsseldorf to Hamburg on the Autobahn. During that stretch, you can listen to Kraftwerk’s album Autobahn seven times — or if you prefer, you can loop its eponymous opening song thirteen times. For it was “Autobahn,” more so than Autobahn, t … | Continue reading