https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbFKplwHY2c About a year ago, a certain kind of cinephile took note of obituaries for Ted Kotcheff, a television-turned-film director who worked steadily from the mid-fifties to the mid-nineties. Even to readers only casually acquainted with movies, more than one...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sj1y9FDJKCM Under most circumstances, there’s nothing particularly shocking about cutting into an eye removed from a dead animal. Gratuitous, maybe, and surely disgusting for some, but certainly not psychologically damaging. I remember a man turning up one day to my...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLiXjaPqSyY The Simpsons has mocked or referenced literature over its many seasons, usually through a book Lisa was reading, or with guest appearances (e.g., Michael Chabon & Jonathan Franzen, Maya Angelou and Amy Tan). And it has referenced Edgar Allan...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4DHxG2O9KU Just days ago, Haruki Murakami’s Japanese publisher announced that his sixteenth novel will come out this summer. A brief section of The Tale of KAHO, translated into English by Philip Gabriel, appeared in the New Yorker in 2024. The...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngp3oxDqngc Though it may have enjoyed occasional waves of pop-cultural prestige over the years, interior design remains an overlooked art. That is to say, few bother to appreciate, or even to notice, its similarities with other, more “serious” forms of...
Paw prints and feline urine stains on a medieval scribe’s manuscript, perhaps they weren’t entirely out of the ordinary in the 15th century. But cats strapped to mini-powder kegs, bounding off to burn down a town — now that’s pretty unusual....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5ClTzfCvQ4 In a brisk WIRED interview, Professor Tarek Masoud answers frequently asked questions about Iran’s history. He explains that Iran is not an Arab country but a predominantly Persian one, with a distinct language and identity. He traces how the...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVHVZjaXzH8 In the world of cryptography, substitution ciphers are child’s play. Indeed, we may remember literally playing with them as children, writing secret messages to our friends by replacing all the letters with numbers, say, or shifting them one or...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LogYI4Lzz2U When we think of modern architecture, we often think first of what’s called the International Style, whose minimalist, rectilinear, decoration-free forms were championed by the likes of Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier. Though they...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwAKPIUKAyM Above and below, you can watch musicians perform “Songs of Consolation,” a 1,000-year-old song set “to the poetic portions of Roman philosopher Boethius’ magnum opus The Consolation of Philosophy,” an influential medieval text written during the 6th century. According to...
