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...
Bargain with the devil and you may wind up with a golden fiddle, supernatural guitar-playing ability, or a room full of gleaming alchemized straw. Whoops, we misattributed that last one. It’s actually Rumpelstiltskin’s doing, but the by-morning-or-else deadline that drives...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwFZkruuta0 If you go to hear Patti Smith in concert, you expect her to sing “Beneath the Southern Cross,” “Because the Night,” and almost certainly “People Have the Power,” the hit single from Dream of Life. Like her 1975 debut Horses, that album...
Sasha Trubetskoy, formerly an undergrad at U. Chicago, has created a “subway-style diagram of the major Roman roads, based on the Empire of ca. 125 AD.” Drawing on Stanford’s ORBIS model, The Pelagios Project, and the Antonine Itinerary, Trubetskoy’s map combines well-known...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZdfE_7cde0 Ask aloud whether reality is real, and you’re liable to be regarded as never truly having left the freshman dorm. But that question has received, and continues to receive, consideration from actual scientists. The Big Think video above assembles...
