When we think of the Apollo missions, we tend to think of images, especially those broadcast on television during the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969. | Continue reading
According to Leonard Cohen, songwriting is a lonely business, but there’s nothing for it, he sings in “Tower of Song,” when you’re “born with the gift of a golden voice' and when “twenty-seven angels from the Great Beyond” tie you to a table and make you write. | Continue reading
Somewhere in the annals of the internet--if this sprawling, near-sentient thing we call the internet actually has annals--there is a fine, fine quote by filmmaker John Waters. | Continue reading
The Big Lebowski came out 20 years ago. | Continue reading
Japanese animation, AKA anime, might be filled with large-eyed maidens, way cool robots, and large-eyed, way cool maiden/robot hybrids, but it often shows a level of daring, complexity and creativity not typically found in American mainstream animation. | Continue reading
For most of us, making a list of our favorite albums involves no small amount of nostalgia. We remember highlights from high school and college: songs on constant rotation after breakups and during summers of bliss. | Continue reading
As an English major undergrad in the 90s, I had a keen side interest in reading philosophy of all kinds. But I had little sense of what I should be reading. I browsed the library shelves, picking out what caught my attention. | Continue reading
We all learn the names, locations, and even characteristics of the oceans in school. But unless we go into oceanography or some other body-of-water-centric profession, few of us keep them at our command. | Continue reading
The connections we make between various philosophers and philosophical schools are often connections that have already been made for us by teachers and scholars on our paths through higher education. | Continue reading
Back in the 1990s I'd often run across volumes of the Unuseless Japanese Inventions series at bookstores. | Continue reading
We've had hundreds and hundreds of years to get used to money in the form of coins and bills, though exactly how long we've used them varies quite a bit from region to region. | Continue reading
Photo via the British LibraryIf you’re a British history buff, next month is an ideal time to be in London for the British Library’s “once-in-a-generation exhibition” Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: | Continue reading
In South Korea, where I live, the Talmud is a bestseller. | Continue reading
There are only two kinds of story, holds a quote often attributed to Leo Tolstoy: a man goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town. | Continue reading
Most people’s to-do lists are, almost by definition, pretty dull, filled with those quotidian little tasks that tend to slip out of our minds. Pick up the laundry. Get that thing for the kid. Buy milk, canned yams and kumquats at the local market. | Continue reading
In high school, the language I most fell in love with happened to be a dead one: Latin. Sure, it’s spoken at the Vatican, and when I first began to study the tongue of Virgil and Catullus, friends joked that I could only use it if I moved to Rome. | Continue reading
Many of us now use the word hobo to refer to any homeless individual, but back in the America of the late 19th and early 20th century, to be a hobo meant something more. | Continue reading
“Cartography was not born full-fledged as a science or even an art,” wrote map historian Lloyd Brown in 1949. “It evolved slowly and painfully from obscure origins.” Many ancient maps made no attempt to reproduce actual geography but served as abstract visual representations of p … | Continue reading
“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
We know that depression affects people from all walks of life. Rich. Poor. Celebs. Ordinary Joes. Young. Old. But, somehow after the death of Robin Williams, there's a renewed focus on depression, and my mind turned immediately to a lecture we featured on the site way back in 200 … | Continue reading
Most people’s to-do lists are, almost by definition, pretty dull, filled with those quotidian little tasks that tend to slip out of our minds. Pick up the laundry. Get that thing for the kid. Buy milk, canned yams and kumquats at the local market. | Continue reading
A vague sense of disquiet settled over Europe in the period between World War I and World War II. As the slow burn of militant ultranationalism mingled with jingoist populism, authoritarian leaders and fascist factions found mounting support among a citizenry hungry for certainty … | Continue reading
Given the image of Communist Russia we’ve mostly inherited from Cold War Hollywood propaganda and cherry-picked TV documentaries, we tend to think of Communist art as sterile, brutalist, devoid of expressive emotion and experiment. But this has never been entirely so. | Continue reading
Every artist explores dimensions of space and place, orienting themselves and their works in the world, and orienting their audiences. Then there are artists like Vincent van Gogh, who make space and place a primary subject. | Continue reading
Get free Philosophy courses online from the world's leading universities. You can download these audio & video courses straight to your computer or mp3 player. For more online courses, visit our complete collection of Free Online Courses. | Continue reading
Take an innocuous statement like, “we should teach children about the life of Helen Keller.” What reasonable, compassionate person would disagree? Hers is a story of triumph over incredible adversity, of perseverance and friendship and love. | Continue reading
He did not, visionary though he was, conceive of one extraordinary use to which wax cylinders might be put—the recovery or reconstruction of extinct and endangered indigenous languages and cultures in California. | Continue reading
On June 10th, at the Sheffield Doc/Fest in England, director Arwen Curry will premiere Worlds of Ursula K Le Guin, the first feature film about the groundbreaking science fiction writer. | 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
Tolkien mostly hated Disney’s creations, and he made these feelings very clear. | Continue reading
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, before he became short-hand for a filmmaker cursed with cosmically bad luck, before he became the sole American member of seminal British comedy group Monty Python, Terry Gilliam made a name for himself creating odd animated bits for the UK series … | Continue reading
Stories of idiosyncratic and demanding composers and bandleaders abound in mid-century jazz—of pioneers who pushed their musicians to new heights and in entirely new directions through seeming sheer force of will. Miles Davis’ name inevitably comes up in such discussions. | Continue reading