https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USW8yf4L-R4 To many of us, the concept of solitary confinement may not sound all that bad: finally, a reprieve from the siege of social and professional requests. Finally, a chance to catch up on all the reading we’ve been meaning...
Few modern writers so remind me of the famous Virginia Woolf quote about fiction as a “spider’s web” more than Argentine fabulist Jorge Luis Borges. But the life to which Borges attaches his labyrinths is a librarian’s life; the strands...
While reporting on the Eurovision Song Contest, the New Yorker’s Anthony Lane “asked a man named Seppo, from the seven-hundred-strong Eurovision Fan Club of Norway, what he loved about Eurovision. ‘Brotherhood of man,’ he said — a slightly ambiguous answer,...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3b6zSpy7P4 Jane Goodall, the revered conservationist, passed away today at age 91. In her honor, we’re featuring above a National Geographic documentary called Jane. Directed by Brett Morgen, the film draws “from over 100 hours of never-before-seen footage that has...
LEBANON 2011. I’d moved to Lebanon to study, after the Israelis had banned me from re-entering Palestine. A friend had already arrived a few weeks before me. Hearing of an apartment for rent in Ashrafiyyeh, she went to check it...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjXZzB5bUAo Stalactites hang tight to the ceiling, and stalagmites push up with might from the floor: this is a mnemonic device you may once have learned, but chances are you haven’t had much occasion to remember it since. Still, it would...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Frud5RFtTi0 Punk rock has a robust tradition of gross-out, offensive comedy—one carried into the present by bands like Fat White Family and Diarrhea Planet, who may not exist were it not for Fear, an unstable L.A. band led by an...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWaCsteIYig The work of the comic artist Jean Giraud, better known as Moebius (or, more stylishly, Mœbius), has often appeared on Open Culture over the years, but even if you’ve never seen it here, you know it. Granted, you may...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGKan6eX5ug Last night, while the home team lost the big game on TVs at a local dive bar, my noisy rock band opened for a chamber pop ensemble. Electric guitars and feedback gave way to classical acoustics, violin, piano, accordion,...
One of the most important stories of the last decade is the influence of identity politics on the Western world. This form of politics exists at the theoretical level, as well as in public policy, but also less subtly in...
