Apart from his comedic, dramatic, and literary endeavors, Stephen Fry is widely known for his avowed technophilia. He once wrote a column on that theme, “Dork Talk,” for the Guardian, in whose inaugural dispatch he laid out his...
One sometimes hears lamented the tendency of movies to depict Mexico — and in particular, its capital Mexico City — as a threatening, rough-and-tumble place where human life has no value. Such concerns turn out to be nearly as old as...
Early in his career, Alfred Hitchcock began making small appearances in his own films. The cameos sometimes lasted just a few brief seconds, and sometimes a little while longer. Either way, they became a signature of Hitchcock’s...
Playing video games, road-tripping across America, binge-listening to podcasts, chatting with artificial intelligence: these are a few of our modern pleasures not just unknown to, but unimaginable by, humanity in the Middle Ages. Yet...
History seems to have settled Buckminster Fuller’s reputation as a man ahead of his time. He inspires short, witty popular videos like YouTuber Joe Scott’s “The Man Who Saw The Future,” and the ongoing legacy of the Buckminster Fuller...
If you can read this, you almost certainly know the French word for a professional automobile driver. That’s because we use the same word in English: chauffeur. French nouns, unlike English ones, come in masculine and feminine varieties,...
In September of 1978, the Grateful Dead traveled to Egypt and played three shows at the Great Pyramid of Giza, with the Great Sphinx looking over their shoulders. It wasn’t the first time a rock band played in an ancient setting....
If you grew up reading American comic books during the second half of the twentieth century, you’ll be familiar with the seal of the Comics Code Authority. I remember seeing it stamped onto the upper-right corner of issues of titles from...
Karl Marx was a German philosopher-historian (with a few other pursuits besides) who wrote in pursuit of an understanding of industrial society as he knew it in the nineteenth century and what its future evolution held in store. There...
“We’re The Cramps, and we’re from New York City, and we drove 3,000 miles to play for you people.” So begins one of the oddest but also the punkest of punk rock concerts in history, as The Cramps play for a crowd at a state...
Carl Gustav Jung, founder of analytic psychology and explorer of the collective unconscious, was born on July 26, 1875 in the village of Kesswil, in the Thurgau canton of Switzerland. Above, we present a fascinating 39-minute interview...
James Sowerby was an artist dedicated to the natural world. It thus comes as no surprise that he was also enormously interested in color, especially given the era in which he lived. Born in 1757, he made his professional start as a...
Since the Victorian era, Edward Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussy-Cat” has been, for generation upon generation in the English-speaking world, the kind of poem that one simply knows, whether one remembers actually having read it or not. As...
In Simone de Beauvoir’s 1945 novel The Blood of Others, the narrator, Jean Blomart, reports on his childhood friend Marcel’s reaction to the word “revolution”: It was senseless to try to change anything in the world or in life; things...
Much attention has been paid to the fall of the Roman Empire, by everyone from august historians like Edward Gibbon to modern-day observers wringing their hands over the fate of the United States of America. But as every Rome...