“People see it as a fake sport. Whenever you tell someone you play Ultimate, it’s like: oh, is that where you throw a frisbee in a basket? Or is that the one where you throw it to a dog? Whenever...
There may be as many doors into Alcoholics Anonymous in the 21st century as there are people who walk through them—from every world religion to no religion. The “international mutual-aid fellowship” has had “a significant and long-term effect on the culture...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MYf4G4INzo Few depictions of ancient Roman life neglect to reference all the time ancient Romans spent at the baths. One gets the impression that their civilization was obsessed with cleanliness, in contrast to most of the societies found around the...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_025NB8alw The most widely known work by the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Japanese artist Hokusai, 神奈川沖浪裏, is usually translated into English as The Great Wave off Kanagawa. That version of the title reflects the iconic scene depicted in the image well enough,...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsR1DSHTXSo Albert Einstein developed his theory of special relativity in 1905, and then mentally mapped out his theory of general relativity between 1907 and 1915. For years to come, the rest of the world would try to catch up with...
In his 1918 poem Radovat’sia rano (It’s Too Early to Rejoice), Vladimir Mayakovsky, the most celebrated poet of his generation in Russia, muses that if his Bolshevik comrades were to ‘find a white guardsman’, they would, without doubt, put him...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-jWZvPTRIA Go to Japan today, and the country will present you with plenty of opportunities to buy pan, tabako, and tempura. These products themselves — bread, cigarettes, and deep-fried seafood or vegetables — will be familiar enough. Even the words that refer...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqufG89Jlyc A little over a decade ago, a curator at the British Film Institute (BFI) discovered the oldest surviving film featuring a Charles Dickens character, “The Death of Poor Joe.” The silent film, directed by George Albert Smith in 1900,...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=On_Pwzc1gzY When the words London and underground come together, the first thing that comes to most of our minds, naturally, is the London Underground. But though it may enjoy the honorable distinction of the world’s first railway to run below the streets,...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpPsAojqcKo Ernest Hemingway seemed to feud with most of the prominent male artists of his time, from Wallace Stevens and T.S. Eliot to F. Scott Fitzgerald. He had a “very strange relationship” with Orson Welles—the two came to blows at...
