Renaissance Europe admired ancient Rome, ancient Rome admired ancient Greece, and ancient Greece admired ancient Egypt. But the admiration could actually go both ways in that last case, since the two civilizations’ periods of existence overlapped. The Greeks made no secret of the … | Continue reading
Without wanting to make too broad a generalization, it’s safe to say that Saturday Evening Post readers probably didn’t understand much about what was going on in San Francisco during the Summer of Love. Or they didn’t, at least, until the magazine ran “Slouching Towards Bethlehe … | Continue reading
It makes sense that Superman would take a tolerant view of immigrants and other minorities, given that he himself arrived on Earth as a refugee from the planet Krypton. The Man of Steel may strike you as an unlikely mouthpiece for progressive ideals, but 1950 found him on a book … | Continue reading
The question of who are the fifteen most influential philosophers of all time may not arise at every conversation down at the pub — not outside the circle of Open Culture readers, in any case. But even among non-specialists, it could spark a livelier debate than you might imagine … | Continue reading
The Tarot has long been a tool of charlatans. But it has also long been embraced by brilliant, unconventional thinkers, many of whom themselves have a touch of the charlatan about them (and who would just as likely admit it with a smile). William Butler Yeats was a fan, as is vis … | Continue reading
The wreck of the RMS Titanic has never ceased to command attention, from pop-cultural fascination to scientific scrutiny and everything in between. That can make it seem, especially to the younger generations, as if humanity has been gazing upon its remains since they first settl … | Continue reading
The stories in the Bible have been told in many ways, not least through film. Among the many cinematic adaptations of Christianity’s holy book, none comes to mind that ends with freeze-frame title cards explaining the later fate of each character, in the manner of Animal House, A … | Continue reading
When J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books appeared in the mid-1950s, they were met with very mixed reviews, an unsurprising reception given that nothing like them had been written for adult readers since Edmund Spenser’s epic 16th century English poem The Faerie Queene, perha … | Continue reading
John Coltrane released “more significant works” than his 1960 “My Favorite Things,” says Robin Washington in a PRX documentary on the classic reworking of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Broadway hit. “A Love Supreme” is often cited as the zenith of the saxophonist’s career. “But if yo … | Continue reading
The writings of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America include many a reference to the likes of Cicero, Montesquieu, and John Locke. That the names Hyder Ali and his son Tipu Sultan never appear may not sound like much of a surprise, even if you happen to know that … | Continue reading
It took nearly 50 years. WKRP in Cincinnati is no longer just a TV sitcom. It’s now a real radio station in Cincinnati. A Cincy-area FM station, known as “The Oasis,” has adopted the WKRP call letters after acquiring them from a nonprofit radio station in North Carolina. The Rale … | Continue reading
The flap of a butterfly’s wings on one side of the world can cause a hurricane on the other, or so they say. If we take it a bit too literally, that old observation may make us wonder what a hurricane can cause. Or if not a hurricane, how about another kind of large-scale natural … | Continue reading
Sit back, relax, put on some music (I’ve found Chopin’s Nocturne in B major well-suited), and watch the video above, a silent data visualization by visionary architect and systems theorist Buckminster Fuller, “the James Brown of industrial design.” The short film from 1965 combin … | Continue reading
Yasujirō Ozu was born in 1903, and made films from the late nineteen-twenties up until his death in 1963. Though not an especially long life, it spanned Japan’s pre- and postwar eras, meaning that in many ways, it ended in a very different country than it began. Not that you’d kn … | Continue reading
More than a few medievalists object to the term “Dark Ages” as applied to the period in which they specialize. That can seem wishful in light of most comparisons between medieval times and the Renaissance that came afterward, or indeed, the era of the Roman Empire that came befor … | Continue reading
No more bummin’, let’s all get to work… Actually, hold up a sec. We’ll all be happier and more productive if we take a moment to start our work day with Confidence, a peppy musical animation from 1933, starring newly elected President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Mickey Mouse pr … | Continue reading
The global bee population comes up in the news every now and again. Sometimes we’re assured that the number is stable or rising; more often, we’re warned about collapsing colonies and the large-scale ecological disaster that could result. As with most high-stakes issues, it can b … | Continue reading
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