When we watch a movie from, say, twenty years ago, it strikes us that both nothing and everything has changed. Apart from their slightly baggier clothes, the people look the same as us. But where are their phones? | Continue reading
Finally bowing to public pressure, the Trump administration has publicly acknowledged which companies received loans from the Paycheck Protection Program designed to protect small businesses harmed by COVID-19. | Continue reading
Who can call themselves fans of cyberpunk, or even modern science fiction, without having experienced William Gibson's Neuromancer? | Continue reading
Romantic poets told us that great art is eternal and transcendent. They also told us everything made by human hands is bound to end in ruin and decay. Both themes were inspired by the rediscovery and renewed fascination for the arts of antiquity in Europe and Egypt. | Continue reading
Most of my generation’s exposure to Japanese culture came heavily mediated by anime and samurai films. | 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
Not since the sixties and seventies, with the black power movement, flowering of Afrocentric scholarship, and debut of Alex Haley’s Roots, novel and mini-series, has there been so much popular interest in the history of slavery. | Continue reading
Many filmmakers have tried to adapt Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, but none, in the estimation of most enthusiasts of either Alice or animation, have fully succeeded. | Continue reading
When it opened in 1977, Star Wars revived the old-fashioned swashbuckling adventure film. Within a few years, National Public Radio made a bet that it could do the same for the radio drama. | Continue reading
Photo of Karlheinz Stockhausen by Kathinka Pasveer via Wikimedia CommonsYou may hear the phrase “electronic music” and think of superstar dubstep DJs in funny helmets at beachside celebrity parties. | Continue reading
It’s odd to think that the gray-faced, gray-suited U.S. Cold Warriors of the 1950s funded Abstract Expressionism and left-wing literary magazines in a cultural offensive against the Soviet Union. And yet they did. | Continue reading
Willem Janszoon Blaeu Celestial Globe 1602No matter how accustomed we've grown over the centuries to flat maps of the world, they can never be perfectly accurate. | Continue reading
When we consider the many identities of David Bowie — Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, the Thin White Duke — we often neglect to include his transformation into an internet entrepreneur. | Continue reading
The movies and journalism have had a long relationship in America, not least because, in Hollywood's heyday, so many screenwriters began their careers in newsrooms. The prolific Ben Hecht, now known as 'the Shakespeare of Hollywood,' started off as a reporter at the Chicago Journ … | Continue reading
Albert Einstein was a precocious child.At the age of twelve, he followed his own line of reasoning to find a proof of the Pythagorean Theorem. At thirteen he read Kant, just for the fun of it. And before he was fifteen he had taught himself differential and integral calculus. | Continue reading
Lewis Pollard, the curator of the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester, England, recently highlighted his favorite object in his museum's collections--this gadget, created circa 1896, used to resuscitate canaries in coal mines. | Continue reading
Aleksander Petrov's animation of Ernest Hemingway's 'The Old Man and the Sea' features over 29,000 frames hand-painted on glass. In 2000, the animated short won an Oscar. | Continue reading
We can learn much about how a historical period viewed the abilities of its children by studying its children's literature. | Continue reading
After winning the Nobel Prize, physicist Max Planck 'went around Germany giving the same standard lecture on the new quantum mechanics. | Continue reading
Unlike his devotee Stephen King, whose novels and stories have spawned more Lovecraftian film and television projects than any writer in the genre, H.P. Lovecraft himself has little cinema credit to his name. | Continue reading
Two years ago historians marked the 100th anniversary of the Spanish Flu, a worldwide pandemic that seemed to be disappearing down the memory hole. Not so fast, said historians, we need to remember the horror. Happy belated anniversary, said 2020, hold my beer. And so here we are … | Continue reading
Paul Klee led an artistic life that spanned the 19th and 20th centuries, but he kept his aesthetic sensibility tuned to the future. | Continue reading
If you keep up with climate change news, you see a lot of predictions of what the world will look like twenty years from now, fifty years from now, a century from now. | Continue reading
Women in the entertainment business who have taken a stand against racism and state violence and oppression have often found their careers ruined as a result, their albums and performances boycotted, opportunities rescinded. | Continue reading
Photo by Mayur Phadtare, via Wikimedia CommonsA recent executive order stating that “the classical architectural style shall be the preferred and default style” for federal buildings in the U.S. has reminded some of other executives who enforced neoclassicicism as the state’s off … | Continue reading
The Golden Age of Illustration is typically dated between 1880 and the early decades of the 20th century. | Continue reading
Here's the latest from Great Big Story: 'Once upon a time, not long ago, the math world fell in love ... with a chalk. But not just any chalk! This was Hagoromo: a Japanese brand so smooth, so perfect that some wondered if it was made from the tears of angels. | Continue reading
Not many readers of the 21st century seek out the work of popular writers of the 19th century, but when they do, they often seek out the work of Jules Verne. | Continue reading
When I hear the word robot, I like to imagine Isaac Asimov’s delightfully Yiddish-inflected Brooklynese pronunciation of the word: “ro-butt,” with heavy stress on the first syllable. (A quirk shared by Futurama’s crustacean Doctor Zoidberg.) Asimov warned us that robots could be … | Continue reading
Adobe has announced that the Flash Player will come to the official end of its life on the last day of this year, December 31, 2020. | Continue reading
Why, in the course of two extraordinary films by Ridley Scott and Denis Villeneuve, do we never learn what the term Blade Runner actually means? Perhaps the mystery only deepens the sense of “super-realism” with which the film leaves audiences, including—and especially—Philip K. | Continue reading
There may be no instrument in the classical repertoire more multidimensional than the cello. Its deep silky voice modulates from moans to exaltations in a single phrase—conveying dignified melancholy and a profound sense of awe. | Continue reading
I remember the first time I sat down and watched Andrei Tarkovsky’s lyrical, meandering sci-fi epic Stalker. | Continue reading
No Japanese filmmaker has received quite as much international scrutiny, and for so long, as Akira Kurosawa. Though now almost twenty years gone, the man known in his homeland as the 'Emperor' of cinema only continues to grow in stature on the landscape of global film culture. | Continue reading
Carl Jung’s Liber Novus, better known as The Red Book, has only recently come to light in a complete English translation, published by Norton in a 2009 facsimile edition and a smaller “reader’s edition” in 2012. | Continue reading
Since humanity has had music, we've also had bad music. And bad music can come from only one source: bad musicians. | Continue reading
Download 1,000 free audio books, mostly classics, to your MP3 player or computer. Includes great works of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. | Continue reading
Three years ago Swedish artist Anders Ramsell created this 35 minute condensed version of Blade Runner, frame by frame, using watercolors. Blade Runner: | Continue reading
Perpetual motion is impossible. Even if we don't know much about physics, we all know that to be true — or at least we've heard it from credible enough sources that we might as well believe it. | Continue reading
It’s hard to imagine that in the late 60s, the band who would become the most famous of the psychedelic era was still an obscurity to most U.S. listeners. | Continue reading
The successes of the Freedman’s Bureau, initiated by Abraham Lincoln in 1865 and first administered under Oliver Howard’s War Department, are all the more remarkable considering the intense popular and political opposition to the agency. | Continue reading
There are 150 of those talks now on the podcast Ram Dass Here and Now. | Continue reading
Despite the dourest demeanor in literary history and a series of plays and novels set in the bleakest of conditions, there’s no doubt that Samuel Beckett was foremost a comic writer. Indeed, it is because of these things that he remains a singularly great comic writer. | Continue reading
The science of optics and the fine art of science illustration arose together in Europe, from the early black-and-white color wheel drawn by Isaac Newton in 1704 to the brilliantly hand-colored charts and diagrams of Goethe in 1810. | Continue reading
If Charles Bukowski were alive today, what would you ask him? | Continue reading
We might think we have a general grasp of the period in European history immortalized in theme restaurant form as 'Medieval Times.' After all, writes Amy White at Medievalists.net, “from tattoos to video games to Game of Thrones, medieval iconography has long inspired fascination … | Continue reading
Presenting a keynote address at an ADL conference, comedian Sacha Baron Cohen wasn't kidding around when he painted a bleak picture of our emerging world: 'Today ... demagogues appeal to our worst instincts. Conspiracy theories once confined to the fringe are going mainstream. | Continue reading
You can create music with Tesla coils if you know how to modulate their 'break rate' with MIDI data and a control unit. Case in point. | Continue reading