https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHdud9km7bQ If pressed to pick the most international art figure of the past dozen years, one could do much worse than the Swedish artist-mystic Hilma af Klint, despite her having been dead for more than 80 years now. As evidenced...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBcB_dYtGUg When woodcut artist Katsushika Hokusai made his famous print The Great Wave off Kanagawa in 1830 — part of the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji — he was 70 years old and had lived his entire life in...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bd6GRXPD0Fw Whether or not we believe that the cards of the tarot have supernatural powers, we all think of them primarily as tools for divination. It might seem as if they’ve played that cultural role since time immemorial, but in...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LN_--egst3s People suffering from dementia lose their ability to take an active part in conversations, everyday activities, and their own physical upkeep. They are prone to sudden mood swings, irritability, depression, and anxiety. They may be stricken with delusions and...
In the two-thousands, the magician-comedians Penn and Teller hosted a television series called Bullshit! In it, they took on a variety of cultural phenomena they regarded as worthy of the titular epithet, from ESP to Area 51, exorcism to creationism, feng...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nN9axktMaY Punk rock and heavy metal were two genres that evolved over the ‘70s, but seemed to run parallel to each other, despite sharing common fashion, sounds, and attitudes. But then there are moments in history, where everybody plays together...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_yP8C7uo3Y Everyone in ancient Rome wore togas, surrounded themselves with pure-white marble statues, bayed for blood as gladiators fought to the death in the Colosseum, programmatically imitated the Greeks, and, after each and every debaucherous feast, excused themselves to the...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOH-HNotTaE Even today, the Paris of the popular imagination is, for the most part, the Paris envisioned by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann and made a reality in the eighteen-fifties and sixties. Not that he could order the city built whole: as...
Image by Jules Jacot Guillarmod, via Wikimedia Commons In 2016, we brought you a rather strange story about the rivalry between poet William Butler Yeats and magician Aleister Crowley. Theirs was a feud over the practices of occult society the...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=playlist Each of us has a different idea of when, exactly, the sixties ended, not as a decade, but as a distinct cultural period. Some have a notion of the “long sixties” that extends well into the seventies; if pressed...
