https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UU6fVBJN_ec Having previously considered whether comedians are the philosophers of our time, we must now ask whether they, too, build upon the work of other philosophers. Few of today’s most prominent funny men and women live a philosophical life —...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CeaqOPg2GY Gladys Mae West was born in rural Virginia in 1930, grew up working on a tobacco farm, and died earlier this month a celebrated mathematician whose work made possible the GPS technology most of us use each and every...
Image via Wikimedia Commons In his 1935 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility,” influential German-Jewish critic Walter Benjamin introduced the term “aura” to describe an authentic experience of art. Aura relates to the physical proximity...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABTbvfkYKBg If you’ve heard Run‑D.M.C.‘s Raising Hell, Rage Against the Machine’s self-titled debut, Johnny Cash’s American Recordings, or Adele’s 21, you’ve heard the work of Rick Rubin. Yet even if you’ve listened closely to every song on which he’s been credited...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oh6OrO9_Dk ?si=2xjPU8WlS7Yk5tRI During her lifetime, the medieval abbess Hildegard von Bingen (1098–1179) composed roughly 77 songs and hymns. She remains the earliest known woman composer in Western classical music and one of the most important composers of the High Middle...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFsdnQCyuOQ Above, Scott Galloway and Kara Swisher explain how everyday Americans can push back against government overreach—by focusing on the economic decisions they make each day. “Trump does not respond to outrage. He responds to markets,” says Galloway. Ergo, it’s...
Image by Ahdi Agus Oktaviana Over the centuries, a variety of places have laid credible claim to being the world’s art center: Constantinople, Florence, Paris, New York. But on the scale of, say, ten millennia, the hot spots become rather...
Image by Bernd Schwabe, via Wikimedia Commons At least when I was in grade school, we learned the very basics of how the Third Reich came to power in the early 1930s. Paramilitary gangs terrorizing the opposition, the incompetence and opportunism...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_d2-FDPMZRc The Renaissance did not, strictly speaking, occur in China. Yet it seems that the Middle Kingdom did have its Renaissance men, so to speak, and in much earlier times at that. We find one such illustrious figure in the...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8yKT7H_KJ0 Un Chien Andalou means “an Andalusian dog,” though the much-studied 1929 short film of that title contains no dogs at all, from Andalusia or anywhere else. In fact, it alludes to a Spanish expression about how the howling of...
