“Jorge Luis Borges 1951, by Grete Stern” by Grete Stern (1904-1999). Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.Jorge Luis Borges’ terse, mind-expanding stories reshaped modern fiction. | Continue reading
Every pet owner knows that animals love to play, but laughter seems reserved for humans, a few apes, and maybe a few birds good at mimicking humans and apes. | Continue reading
Nevertheless, he remains decidedly non-dead (and indeed active on Twitter) today, though no doubt reality-based enough to accept that he's no less mortal than his fellow Pythons Graham Chapman and Terry Jones, who've preceded him into the afterlife — if indeed there is an afterli … | Continue reading
Origami artist Juho Könkkölä spent 50 hours folding an origami samurai from a single square sheet of paper, with no cutting or ripping used in the process. He describes his process on Reddit:Folded from a single square sheet of 95cm x 95cm Wenzhou rice paper without any cutting. | Continue reading
Donovan’s “Hurdy Gurdy Man” may be the creepiest song ever written about an obscure medieval instrument (made all the more so by its use in David Fincher’s Zodiac), but the Hurdy Gurdy did not give his recording its ominous sound. Those droning notes come from an Indian tanpura. | Continue reading
The history of the printed word is full of bibliographic twists and turns, major historical moments, and the significant printing of books now so obscure no one has read them since their publication. | Continue reading
He was, according to mathematician Mark Kac “in his taxonomy of the two types of geniuses,” a “magician” and “a champion of scientific knowledge so effective and so beloved that he has generated an entire canon of personal mythology,” writes Maria Popova at Brain Pickings. | Continue reading
The internet as we know it today began with a coffee pot. Despite the ring of exaggeration, that claim isn't actually so far-fetched. When most of us go online, we expect something new: often not just something new to read, but something new to watch. | Continue reading
On August 11, 1992, the writer Douglas Coupland made an appearance at the grand opening of Minneapolis' Mall of America, the largest shopping mall on Earth. | Continue reading
Image by George Redgrave, via Flickr CommonsWe asked our readers what books made the biggest difference in their lives, and here's what they had to say. The list below tells you what books shaped their lives and why.1984 - George Orwell1984 “was the first book I actually enjoyed … | Continue reading
During his days as Harvard's influential president, Charles W. Eliot made a frequent assertion: If you were to spend just 15 minutes a day reading the right books, a quantity that could fit on a five foot shelf, you could give yourself a proper liberal education. The publisher P. … | Continue reading
We have become quite used to pronouncements of doom, from scientists predicting the sixth mass extinction due to the measurable effects of climate change, and from religionists declaring the apocalypse due to a surfeit of sin. | Continue reading
Before the word processor, before White-Out, before Post It Notes, there were straight pins. Or, at least that's what Jane Austen used to make edits in one of her rare manuscripts. In 2011, Oxford's Bodleian Library acquired the manuscript of Austen's abandoned novel, The Watsons … | Continue reading
Creative Commons image by Rob Bogaerts, via the National Archives in HollandUmberto Eco knew a great many things. Indeed too many things, at least according to his critics: | Continue reading
If you were in high school or college when Wikipedia emerged, you'll remember how strenuously we were cautioned against using such an 'unreliable source' for our assignments. | Continue reading
“We don't make mistakes. We have happy accidents,” the late Bob Ross soothed fans painting along at home, while brushing an alarming amount of black onto one of his signature nature scenes. | Continue reading
The anti-distraction device is the modern mousetrap: build a better one, and the world will beat a path to your door. | Continue reading
Not so long ago, a wave of long-form entreaties rolled through social media insisting that we stop building rock cairns. Like many who scrolled past them, I couldn't quite imagine the offending structures they meant, let alone recall constructing one myself. | Continue reading
Technology has come so far that we consider it no great achievement when a device the size of a single paper book can contain hundreds, even thousands, of different texts. | Continue reading
Errol Morris didn't go all the way to the Crimean Peninsula just because of a sentence written by Susan Sontag. | Continue reading
Debussy sat down at a contraption called a Welte-Mignon reproducing piano and recorded a series of performances for posterity. The machine was designed to encode the nuances of a pianist's playing, including pedaling and dynamics, onto piano rolls for later reproduction, like th … | Continue reading
Necessity being the mother of invention, this led to the creation of an ingenious solution: daisugi, the growing of additional trees, in effect, out of existing trees | Continue reading
Net, the BBC's television series about the possibilities of this much-talked-about new thing called the internet. 'They all tried to see into the future, and they all got it wrong. Orwell's 1984, Huxley's Brave New World, Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: all, to some extent or other, wro … | Continue reading
There’s ahead of its time, then there’s Traité des couleurs servant à la peinture à l’eau -- or, in its original Dutch title, Klaer Lightende Spiegel der Verfkonst, a 900-page book of paint colors made before any such things were common tools of the artist’s, scientist’s, and ind … | Continue reading
The Prince, The Canterbury Tales, The Communist Manifesto, The Souls of Black Folk, The Elements of Style: we've read all these, of course. Or at least we've read most of them (one or two for sure), if our ever-dimmer memories of high school or college are to be trusted. | Continue reading
Pennie Smith was not a fan. | Continue reading
Watch 1150 quality movies online. Includes classics, indies, film noir, documentaries showcasing the talent of our greatest actors, actresses and directors. | Continue reading
A wise woman once quoth that one man’s adult coloring book is another’s Medieval Tapestry Edit.If taking crayons to empty outlines of mandalas, floral patterns, and forest and ocean scenes has failed to calm your mind, the Historic Tale Construction Kit may cure what ails you. | Continue reading
In movies like Seven Samurai and High and Low, director Akira Kurosawa took the cinematic language of Hollywood and improved on it, creating a vigorous, muscular method of visual storytelling that became a stylistic playbook for the likes of Martin Scorsese, George Lucas and Fran … | Continue reading
Behold George Orwell's 6 rules for writing clean, tight, clear prose. | Continue reading
The developers of the free Google Arts & Culture app have some sobering news. | Continue reading
Image via Wikimedia CommonsMost of the twentieth century's notable men of letters — i.e., writers of books, of essays, of reportage — seem also to have, literally, written a great deal of letters. | Continue reading
'The year 1925 was a golden moment in literary history,' writes the BBC's Jane Ciabattari. 'Ernest Hemingway’s first book, In Our Time, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby were all published that year. | Continue reading
Whatever your feelings about the sentimental, lighthearted 1960 Disney film Pollyanna, or the 1913 novel on which it’s based, it’s fair to say that history has pronounced its own judgment, turning the name Pollyanna into a slur against excessive optimism, an epithet reserved for … | Continue reading
Michel Houellebecq's Les Particules élémentaires. 'Sometimes I go on the Minitel and check out the sex sites, that's about it.' Here those reading the English translation of the novel (in this case Frank Wynne's, called Atomised) will tilt their heads: the 'Minitel'? | Continue reading
For those with the time, skill, and drive, LEGO is the perfect medium for wildly impressive recreations of iconic structures, like the Taj Mahal, Eiffel Tower, the Titanic and now the Roman Colosseum.But water? A wave? | Continue reading
Filippo Tommaso MarinettiOdds are Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the father of Futurism and a dedicated provocateur, would be crestfallen to discover how closely his most incendiary gastronomical pronouncement aligns with the views of today’s low-carb crusaders. | Continue reading
It's fair to say that few of us now marvel at moving walkways, those standard infrastructural elements of such utilitarian spaces as airport terminals, subway stations, and big-box stores. But there was a time when they astounded even residents of one of the most cosmopolitan cit … | Continue reading
There is no one Blade Runner. Ridley Scott's influential 'neo-noir' has appeared in several different versions over the past 38 years, both official — the 'director's cut,' the 'final cut,' and lest we forget, the now-derided first theatrical cut — and unofficial. | Continue reading
When I think of roller skates, I first think of 1997’s Boogie Nights and De La Soul’s 1991 hit “A Roller Skating Jam Named ‘Saturdays.’” I date myself to a time not particularly well known as a golden age of roller skating (not the kinds in those references, in any case). | Continue reading
We remember the bluesman Robert Johnson as the Jimi Hendrix of the 1930s, a guitarist of staggering skill who died before age thirty. Both found mainstream success, but Johnson's came posthumously: in fact, his music and Hendrix's first music hit it big in the same decade, the 19 … | Continue reading
Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters.' With that enormous map, in all its singular accuracy, cast out, smaller, imperfect ones presumably won the day again. | Continue reading
As all of us have noticed in recent months, living in a viral pandemic really messes with your sense of time. A few months feels like a decade. Time slows to a crawl. | Continue reading
Photo via Wikimedia CommonsIn the past few years, when far-right nationalists are banned from social media, violent extremists face boycotts, or institutions refuse to give a platform to racists, a faux-outraged moan has gone up: “So much for the tolerant left!” “So much for libe … | Continue reading
“What has been my prettiest contribution to the culture?” asked Kurt Vonnegut in his autobiography Palm Sunday. His answer? | Continue reading
'Great literature is one of two stories,' we often quote Leo Tolstoy as saying: 'a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.' That's all well and good for the author of War and Peace, but what about the thousands of screenwriters struggling to come up with the next hit m … | Continue reading
If you follow the ongoing beef many popular scientists have with philosophy, you’d be forgiven for thinking the two disciplines have nothing to say to each other. That’s a sadly false impression, though they have become almost entirely separate professional institutions. | Continue reading
Bill Murray isn’t one of those actors who disappears into a role.Nor is he much of a chameleon on canvas, however iconic, as artist Eddy Torigoe demonstrates with a series that grafts Murray’s famous mug onto a number of equally well-known paintings. | Continue reading