https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PekrB_IuGIc A century ago, the great French composer Claude Debussy sat down at a contraption called a Welte-Mignon reproducing piano and recorded a series of performances for posterity. The machine was designed to encode the nuances of a pianist’s playing, including pedaling...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjrG7CT3vIg When the Nazis came to power in 1933, they declared the beginning of a “Thousand-Year Reich” that ultimately came up about 988 years short. Fascism in Italy managed to hold on to power for a couple of decades, which...
James Hoffmann, the author of The World Atlas of Coffee and the creator of a coffee-centric YouTube channel, can tell you many things about coffee—from how to roast coffee, to the tools and techniques needed to make espresso, to the ultimate French...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TunR4zCQ5Fk The youngest moviegoers today do not, of course, remember a time before visual effects could be created digitally. What may give us more pause is that, at this point in cinema history, most of their parents don’t remember it...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QiORD2v5Q6Q ?si=RT8MgKeGcVzX6p9X How many people have ever walked the earth? Good question, even if you’ve never quite pondered it before. According to the Population Reference Bureau, a non-profit research organization, if you travel back to 8000 B.C.E., the world population...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVWpFcVRPxo If you want to know what it was like to live in seventeenth-century London, read the diary of Samuel Pepys. While doing so, take note of his frequent references to the uncleanliness of the city’s streets: “very dirty and...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0BxzsEPJqE Over the decades, Tom Jones has performed with the best of them. In 1969, we can find him singing “Long Time Gone” with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and taking them delightfully by surprise. The same goes for his...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZnW-E70wq8 We didn’t have civilization until we had cities, and we didn’t have cities until we had agriculture. So, at least, goes a widely accepted narrative in “big history” — a narrative somewhat troubled by the discovery of ruins on...
You may have seen every single one of Studio Ghibli’s animated films, going well beyond the Hayao Miyazaki-directed My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, and Kiki’s Delivery Service to the less widely known but also charmingly crafted likes of Ocean Waves, My...
Image via Wikimedia Commons The site Fast Company published an article that describes the “Complaint Restraint project,” an initiative that aims to create a “positive life by eliminating negative statements.” It’s an admirable goal. Though most of us have a perverse...
