https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgMHtALvsA4 Much attention has been paid to the fall of the Roman Empire, by everyone from august historians like Edward Gibbon to modern-day observers wringing their hands over the fate of the United States of America. But as every Rome enthusiast...
The idea of the auteur director has been a controversial one at times given the sheer number of people required at every stage to produce a film. But it hangs together for me when you look at the films of...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lgzz-L7GFg In 2015, we highlighted for you The Strange Case of the Cosmic Rays, a largely-forgotten 1957 educational science film. The production is notable partly because it was shot by Frank Capra, the influential director who had won not one, not two, but...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzORw1dZww8 Brian Eno once wrote that “it’s possible that our grandchildren will look at us in wonder and say, ‘You mean you used to listen to to exactly the same thing over and over again?’ ” That speculation comes from an...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNjRxLK-beE Displacement is a bitter muse, but a very powerful one. The experience of exile has played a huge role for thousands of years in literary history, making way for the likes of Hannah Arendt and Edward Said to explore...
A non-event, a continuity: growing rapeseed in Ukraine. For the most part, it’s an unsensational succession of seasonal repetitions: hybridized seeds are sown late summer into nitrogen-treated soil; phosphorus fertilizer is added in autumn to strengthen roots; the plants mature...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-f5YelgmMs We’ve all read plenty of literature written in the first person, and plenty of literature written in the third person. The second person, with its main subject of neither “I” nor “he” or “she” but “you,” is considerably harder...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDlETESajIc From Abruzzo to Vergemoli, small Italian towns and villages have recently been making their historic homes available for purchase for as low as €1. Given the picturesque nature of many of these places, such offers have proven practically irresistible...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPtv14q9ZDg As a young guitar player, perhaps no one inspired me as much as Jimi Hendrix, though I never dreamed I’d attain even a fraction of his skill. But what attracted me to him was his near-total lack of formality—he...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUDEUQMCyKE This past May, YouTuber Jenny Nicholson set off waves of social-media discourse with “The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel,” a four-hour-long video critique of Disney’s hugely expensive, now-shuttered Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser in Orlando, Florida. Having gone...
