https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qw_GaeJnoSI One can easily imagine a reader enjoying both The Lord of the Rings and Dune. Both of those works of epic fantasy were published in the form of a series of long novels beginning in the mid-twentieth century; both create...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWjtQ5IGr2w If you’re a regular listener, you know that Ezra Klein wraps up his podcast interviews with a familiar question: what three books would you recommend to the audience? When Klein interviewed Brian Eno in October, the producer had these...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=842OX2_vCic It’s easy to imagine the myriad difficulties with which you’d be faced if you were suddenly transported a millennium back in time. But if you’re a native (or even proficient) English speaker in an English-speaking part of the world,...
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...
