If you made it big in seventeenth-century Bavaria, you showed it by creating a garden with all the plants in the known world. That’s what Johann Konrad von Gemmingen, Prince-Bishop of Eichstätt did, anyway, and he wasn’t about to let his botanical wonderland die with him. To that … | Continue reading
Image via Diego Sevilla Ruiz A certain Zen proverb goes something like this: “A five year old can understand it, but an 80 year old cannot do it.” The subject of this riddle-like saying has been described as “mindfulness”—or being absorbed in the moment, free from routine mental … | Continue reading
We suppose it’s conceivable that a gift of a wooden Totoro figurine, hand-carved from a single block using 50 different kinds of chisels, might spark a reverence for traditional Japanese craft and nature in the next generation… Or, they may be left wishing you’d given them a vast … | Continue reading
This dance is serious. This dance is necessary. Do you feel that change? — David Byrne Everyone can dance, though some of us need a push from an enthusiastic, encouraging instructor…like singer-songwriter David Byrne. Movement has long been a hallmark of the former Talking Heads … | Continue reading
On December 21, Willis Gibson, a 13-year-old from Stillwater, Oklahoma, became the first person to push Tetris to its absolute limit. Around the 38:20 mark of the video above, Gibson advances to Level 157 and soon encounters Tetris’ “kill screen.” Realizing that he’s broken Tetri … | Continue reading
They Might Be Giants achieved pop-cultural immortality when they covered Jimmy Kennedy and music by Nat Simon’s novelty song “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” in 1990. Key to the the lyrics’ humor is their simultaneous fixation on and apparent disinterest in the reason for the re-n … | Continue reading
Are pinecones related to pineapples? This was the unexpected question with which my wife confronted me as we woke up this morning. As luck would have it, Dominic Walliman has given us an entertaining way to check: just a few days ago he released his Map of Plants, through which h … | Continue reading
More than thirty years after it was first privately published in 1928, Lady Chatterley’s Lover became the subject of the most famous obscenity trial in English history. Though the ultimate decision of R v Penguin Books Ltd in favor of the publisher opened a cultural floodgate in … | Continue reading
When The Great Gatsby was first published, it flopped; nearly a century later, its place at the pinnacle of American literature is almost universally agreed upon. Of the objectors, many no doubt remember too vividly having to answer essay questions about the meaning of the green … | Continue reading
Happy New Year! We can now “do to Disney what Disney did to the great works of the public domain before him,” according to Harvard law professor and public domain expert, Lawrence Lessig, hailed by The New Yorker as “the most important thinker on intellectual property in the Inte … | Continue reading
From 2006 to 2009, Bob Dylan hosted the Theme Time Radio Hour on Sirius Satellite Radio. Each show featured “an eclectic mix of songs, from a wide variety of musical genres, … along with Dylan’s on-air thoughts and commentary interspersed with phone calls, email readings, contrib … | Continue reading
Early in his collecting odyssey, animation historian, archivist, and educator Tommy José Stathes earned the honorific Cartoon Cryptozoologist from Cinebeasts, a “New York-based collective of film nerds, vidiots, and programmers investigating the furthest reaches of the moving ima … | Continue reading
But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long tim … | Continue reading
A new deal to start a new year: Coursera is offering a $200 discount on its annual subscription plan called “Coursera Plus.” Normally priced at $399, Coursera Plus (now available for $199) gives you access to 90% of Coursera’s courses, Guided Projects, Specializations, and Profes … | Continue reading
However detailed they may be in other respects, many accounts of daily life centuries and centuries ago pass over the use of the toilet in silence. Even if they didn’t, they wouldn’t involve the kind of toilets we would recognize today, but rather chamber pots, outhouses, and oth … | Continue reading
From 1967 to 1969, Tom and Dick Smothers hosted The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, a politely edgy comedy show that tested the boundaries of mainstream television and the patience of CBS executives. Playing to a younger demographic, the show took positions against the Vietnam War … | Continue reading
Image by Zairon, via Wikimedia CommonsAmong the non-wine-related points of interest in the Loire Valley, the Château de Chambord stands tall — or rather, both tall and wide, being easily the largest château in the region. 'A Unesco World Heritage site with more than 400 rooms, in … | Continue reading
Some years ago, the Guardian’s Anne T. Donahue recommended, as an alternative Christmas movie, Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail from 1998. “Admittedly, You’ve Got Mail takes place from October to spring,” she writes, “but what matters most is that the movie’s most compelling scenes … | Continue reading
Image via The Bodleian Library If you were to ask a certain kind of Englishman what sets his homeland apart from the rest of the world, he might point to the strength of its traditions. And what holds true for England itself holds even truer for its most renowned institutions, es … | Continue reading
Perhaps at some point in the future,the poems in your tongue I composed,will be brought to your notice,and if so, to delight will I then be disposed. - Curt Bloch, Het Onderwater CabaretZines typically tend toward the ephemeral, owing to their small circulations, erratic publicat … | Continue reading
Ten years ago, we featured John Waters’ handmade Christmas cards, which he’s been making since he was a high-school student in 1964, long before William S. Burroughs deemed him the “Pope of Trash” (also the title of a retrospective exhibition at the Academy of Motion Pictures in … | Continue reading
After David Bowie died in 2016, we discovered that the musician had a knack for doing impressions of fellow celebrities. Could he sing a song in the style of Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, Tom Waits, and Bruce Springsteen? Turns out, he could. And yes, he could do an Elvis impression too. T … | Continue reading
For Pretty Much Pop’s annual holiday episode, your hosts Mark Linsenmayer, Lawrence Ware, Sarahlyn Bruck, and Al Baker talk all things Muppets, but in particular the 1992 film The Muppet Christmas Carol, wherein Michael Caine gives us just as strong and serious a Scrooge as you m … | Continue reading
Note: With the recent passing of Shane Macgowan, we’re bringing back a post from 2018 and revisiting The Pogues’ song “Fairytale of New York.” The offbeat Christmas classic is currently #5 on the Billboard Singles Chart in the UK. Drugstore Cowboy, Barfly, Leaving Las Vegas, even … | Continue reading
Pantone has declared “Peach Fuzz” the Color of the Year. This selection, however, raises the question: How did Pantone become the global authority on color? Above, the Wall Street Journal describes how Pantone began as a commercial printing company during the 1950s. Then, in the … | Continue reading
The received image of the Aztecs, with their savage battles and frequent acts of human sacrifice, tends to imply a violence-saturated, death-obsessed culture. Given that, it will hardly come as a surprise to learn of an Aztec musical instrument discovered in the hands of a sacrif … | Continue reading
Since it came out this past November, Ridley Scott’s Napoleon has drawn a variety of critical reactions. Whatever else can be said about it, it certainly takes a different tack from past depictions of that particular French Emperor. It was, perhaps, Scott’s good luck not to have … | Continue reading
FYI: The University of Chicago Press has made available online — at no cost –five volumes of The History of Cartography. Or what Edward Rothstein, of The New York Times, called “the most ambitious overview of map making ever undertaken.” He continues: People come to know the worl … | Continue reading
From Kurzgesagt comes the history of our planet in one hour. They write: “Earth is 4.5 billion years old — which is approximately the same amount of time it took us to create this video. We’ve scaled the complete timeline of our Earth’s life into our first animated movie! Every s … | Continue reading
Many first-time visitors to the Louvre experience a letdown to discover how small the Mona Lisa is -just 21” x 30”. Meanwhile, over in Amsterdam, visitors have been flocking to the Rijksmuseum, eager to lay eyes on the two smallest formal works in the museum’s collection. Measuri … | Continue reading
When A Charlie Brown Christmas first aired 58 years ago, few had any confidence that it would be a hit. Its story and animation, bare-bones even by the standards of mid-nineteen-sixties television, made a positive impression on neither CBS’ executives nor on many of the special’s … | Continue reading
Threads is on the rise. After getting released in over 100 countries (including the US and UK) earlier this year, Meta has just made Threads available in the EU. And that’s where we’re now sharing our daily posts, along with other objects of cultural interest. If you sign up, ple … | Continue reading
Cast your mind, if you will, to the city of Ceuta. If you’ve never heard of it, or can’t quite recall its location, you can easily find out by searching for it on your map application of choice. Back in the twelfth century, however, you might have had to consult an image of the k … | Continue reading
It was something of a Christmas ritual at Hunter S. Thompson’s Colorado cabin, Owl Farm. Every year, his secretary Deborah Fuller would take down the Christmas tree and leave it on the front porch rather than dispose of it entirely. That’s because Hunter, more often than not, wan … | Continue reading
?si=ZY3lYv-cyq-9hJWa Netflix once delivered movies not by streaming them over the internet, but by literally delivering them: on DVDs, that is, shipped through the postal service. This tends to come as a surprise to the service’s many users under the age of about 35, or in countr … | Continue reading
It’s time to forget nearly everything you know about Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer…at least as established by the 1964 Rankin/Bass stop motion animated television special. You can hang onto the source of Rudolph’s shame and eventual triumph — the glowing red nose that got him bo … | Continue reading
Jesus Christ: as soon as you hear those words, assuming they’re not being used exclamatorily, you see a face. In almost all cases, that face is bearded and framed by long brown hair. Usually it has strong, somewhat sharp features and an expression of benevolence, patience, faint … | Continue reading
Last year, the British Film Institute’s Sight and Sound magazine conducted its once-a-decade poll to determine the greatest films of all time. As usual, the results were divided into two sections: one for the critics’ votes, and the other for the filmmakers’. The latter put Stanl … | Continue reading
If you really want to impress your family, friends, and social-media following with your next voyage abroad, consider booking a trip to Thule. But where, exactly, is it? It could be Iceland or Greenland within the Orkney archipelago of northern Scotland; it could be the Estonian … | Continue reading
In December 1931, having just embarked on a 40-stop lecture tour of the United States, Winston Churchill was running late to dine with financier Bernard Baruch on New York City’s Upper East Side. He hadn’t bothered to bring Baruch’s address, operating under the incorrect assumpti … | Continue reading
?si=ua0n7JebOzIPV0zM The Beatles or the Stones? We’ve been debating that question for the past 60 years. Above, the London-based company Dog & Rabbit continues the conversation with a clever video that animates Beatles and Stones album covers. From there, all kinds of high jinks … | Continue reading
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ep-OnsDieFQOuch! | Continue reading
On Friday, Glen Hansard & Lisa O’Neill performed “Fairytale of New York” at Shane MacGowan’s funeral, giving the Pogues’ frontman quite the send-off. The moving performance took place before a packed church in Nenagh, a country town in Ireland. And it all ends, perhaps fittingly, … | Continue reading
What history nerd doesn’t thrill to Thomas Edison speaking to us from beyond the grave in a 50th anniversary repeat of his groundbreaking 1877 spoken word recording of (those hoping for loftier stuff should dial it down now) Mary Had a Little Lamb? The original represents the fir … | Continue reading
Before electronic amplification, instrument makers and musicians had to find newer and better ways to make themselves heard among ensembles and orchestras and above the din of crowds. Many of the acoustic instruments we’re familiar with today—guitars, cellos, violas, etc.—are the … | Continue reading
On the evening of January 12, 1971, CBS viewers across the United States sat down to a brand new sitcom preceded by a highly unusual disclaimer. The program they were about to see, it declared, “seeks to throw a humorous spotlight on our frailties, prejudices, and concerns. By ma … | Continue reading
You’re busy. You don’t have much time to figure out the deal with Large Language Models (aka LLMs). But you have some curiosity. Enter Andrej Karpathy and his presentation, “A Busy Person’s Introduction to Large Language Models.” It’s a one-hour tutorial that explains “the core t … | Continue reading
Not quite a century ago, Shanghai was known as 'the Paris of the East.' (Or it became one of the cities to enjoy that reputation, at any rate.) Today, you can catch a high-speed train in Shanghai and, just an hour later, arrive in a place that has made a much more literal bid for … | Continue reading