CULTURE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aA0wB3d7MgE It would hard­ly be notable to make the acquain­tance of a Greek Bud­dhist today. Despite hav­ing orig­i­nat­ed in Asia, that reli­gion — or phi­los­o­phy, or way of life, or what­ev­er you pre­fer to call it — now has adher­ents...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_wt5AFjRQo Pro­duced between 1956 and 1964 by AT&T, the Bell Tele­phone Sci­ence Hour TV spe­cials antic­i­pate the lit­er­ary zani­ness of The Mup­pet Show and the sci­en­tif­ic enthu­si­asm of Cos­mos. The “ship of the imag­i­na­tion” in Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s Cos­mos reboot may in fact owe...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4DiRd9_0_c Char­lie Chap­lin and Buster Keaton were the two biggest com­e­dy stars of the silent era, but as it hap­pened, they nev­er shared the screen until well into the reign of sound. In fact, their col­lab­o­ra­tion did­n’t come about until...

As a New York City sub­way rid­er, I am con­stant­ly exposed to pub­lic health posters. More often than not these fea­ture a pho­to of a whole­some-look­ing teen whose sober expres­sion is meant to con­vey hind­sight regret at hav­ing tak­en up...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNPaLAfk2XA One often hears that there’s no mon­ey to be made in music any­more. But then, there was no mon­ey to be made in music when Bob Dylan start­ed his career either—at least accord­ing to Bob Dylan. “If you could...

East­man giv­ing Edi­son the first roll of movie film, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons This piece picks up where Part 1 of Peter Kauf­man’s arti­cle left off yes­ter­day… The epis­te­mo­log­i­cal night­mare we seem to be in, bom­bard­ed over our screens and speak­ers...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HSIWfPTSMM Char­lie Chap­lin came up in vaude­ville, but it was silent film that made him the most famous man in the world. His mas­tery of that form primed him to feel a degree of skep­ti­cism about sound when it came...

Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons How did we get to the point where we’ve come to believe so many lies that 77 mil­lion Amer­i­cans vot­ed into the White House a crim­i­nal real­i­ty TV star from NBC, one groomed by a real­i­ty...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1p5Ozgwb1U Robots seem to have been much on the pub­lic mind back in the nine­teen-thir­ties. Matt Novak at Pale­o­fu­ture gives the exam­ple of a moment in 1932 when “the world was awash in news­pa­per sto­ries about a robot that had...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFWCbGzxofU Say what you want about YouTube’s neg­a­tive effects (end­less soy faces, influ­encers, its devi­ous and fas­cist-lean­ing algo­rithms) but it has offered to cre­ators a space in which to indulge. And that’s one of the rea­sons I’ve been a fan...