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oppression have often found their careers ruined as a result, their albums and performances boycotted, opportunities rescinded.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
You'll get a charge out this picture taken long ago. It captures Mark Twain, a literary giant of the 19th century, tinkering in the laboratory of the great inventor, Nikola Tesla. | Continue reading
Peter Thiel has many claims to fame in Silicon Valley. He co-founded PayPal in 1998, before selling it to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002. He later launched various hedge funds, and made early investments in Facebook. | Continue reading
Download 1,300 free courses from Stanford, Yale, MIT, Harvard, Berkeley and other great universities to your computer or mobile device. Over 45,000 hours of free audio & video lectures. | Continue reading
Cormac McCarthy has been—as one 1965 reviewer of his first novel, The Orchard Tree, dubbed him—a “disciple of William Faulkner.' He makes admirable use of Faulknerian traits in his prose, and I'd always assumed he inherited his punctuation style from Faulkner as well. | Continue reading
Perhaps the most well-read writer on his time, English poet John Milton “knew the biblical languages, along with Homer’s Greek and Vergil’s Latin,” notes the NYPL. He likely had Dante’s Divine Comedy in mind when he wrote Paradise Lost. | Continue reading
Despite his respected facility with the English language, Argentine master craftsman of short fiction Jorge Luis Borges did his best work in his native Spanish. Though we remember prolific interviewer and even more prolific writer William F. | Continue reading
Lawrence of Arabia, they don't talk about the details of the plot,' writes Roger Ebert in his 'Great Movies' column on the 1962 David Lean epic. | Continue reading
Katy Waldman in a recent New York Times Magazine piece. 'Think of T.S. | Continue reading
No amount of continuous repeats in coffeeshops around the world can dull the crystalline brilliance of Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue one bit. | Continue reading
Many of us grade the books we read, but Kurt Vonnegut graded the books he wrote. | Continue reading
For some of us, it’s been a little while since college days. For others of us, it’s been a little while longer. | Continue reading
Think of the name Buckminster Fuller, and you may think of a few oddities of mid-twentieth-century design for living: the Dymaxion House, the Dymaxion Car, the geodesic dome. | 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
According to Freud, neurotics never know what they want, and so never know when they’ve got it. So it is with the seeker after fluent cultural literacy, who must always play catch-up to an impossible ideal. | Continue reading
Poor Kafka, born too early to blame his writer’s block on 21st-century digital excuses: social media addiction, cell phone addiction, streaming video | Continue reading
To be a non-believer in some parts of the world, and in much of Europe for many centuries, means to commit a crime against the state. | Continue reading
We all have bodies, but how many of us truly know our way around them? | Continue reading
Too often those in power lump thousands of years of Middle Eastern religion and culture into monolithic entities to be feared or persecuted. But at least one government institution is doing exactly the opposite. | Continue reading