CULTURE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rc2yU7OUMcI The inner crit­ic cre­ates writer’s block and sti­fles adven­tur­ous writ­ing, hems it in with safe clichés and over­think­ing. Every writer has to find his or her own way to get free of that sour­puss ratio­nal­ist who insists on stran­gling...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vjOKuv14gQ Upon hear­ing the name of Sal­vador Dalí, even a total lay­man in the art world is bound to get visions of melt­ing clocks. Sur­pris­ing­ly, for an artist who showed so much self-mar­ket­ing savvy, Dalí nev­er brought an actu­al time­piece...

It will no doubt come as a relief to many read­ers that San­ta Claus appears to have been a Union sup­port­er. We know this because he appears dis­trib­ut­ing gifts to sol­diers from that side of the Mason-Dixon in one of...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qauMSeqWpU One can hard­ly con­sid­er the Christ­mas sea­son for long, at least in the Eng­lish-speak­ing world, with­out the work of Charles Dick­ens com­ing to mind. That owes for the most part, of course, to A Christ­mas Car­ol, the novel­la that...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHpiHy-y7Wo Die Hard is a Christ­mas movie. That once-con­trar­i­an cat­e­go­riza­tion has increas­ing­ly been accept­ed over the past cou­ple of decades, at least since an edi­tor with whom I’ve often worked first declared it in a Slate roundup. As a result, John McTier­nan’s...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7oJ7s1sLQ8 When dis­cussing a musi­cian like Fela Kuti, many of our usu­al terms fail us. They fail us, that is, if we came of age in a musi­cal cul­ture in which artists and bands put out an album of ten...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NS0rhxE0C0I How­ev­er cel­e­brat­ed by his­to­ri­ans, scru­ti­nized by archae­ol­o­gists, and descend­ed-upon by tourists it may be, Pom­peii is not excep­tion­al — not even in the fate of hav­ing been buried in ash by Mount Vesu­vius in the year 76, which also...

Who doesn’t trea­sure a hand­made present? As the years go by, we may begin to offload the ill-fit­ting sweaters, the nev­er lit sand cast can­dles, and the Sty­ro­foam ball snow­men. But a present made of words takes up very lit­tle space, and...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3ub-QBrGCg It was some­thing of a Christ­mas rit­u­al at Hunter S. Thomp­son’s Col­orado cab­in, Owl Farm. Every year, his sec­re­tary Deb­o­rah Fuller would take down the Christ­mas tree and leave it on the front porch rather than dis­pose of it...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__BaaMfiD0Q In the video above, Use­fulCharts cre­ator Matt Bak­er sug­gests that we not refer to the peri­od span­ning the fifth and the late fif­teenth cen­turies as the “dark ages.” In jus­ti­fi­ca­tion, he does­n’t put forth the argu­ment, now fair­ly com­mon,...