https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyLNPumMMTs Practically anyone could take one glance at Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and identify it as a Picasso, even if they’ve never seen it before and couldn’t say anything else about it. That alone goes some way to explaining why the painting...
Above, we have the menu for an 1899 Thanksgiving dinner at the Plaza Hotel in New York. If you were a turkey, you had it relatively easy. But the ducks? Not so much. On the menu, you’ll find Mallard duck...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXHrPfWJcCI In his new video above, the writer Daniel Pink proposes the following exercise: “Grab a book and time yourself. How long can you read without getting up or checking your phone? Really try to push yourself, but don’t judge...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wq7hMuiz1mI You might know Winsor McCay (1867? ‑1934) for the gorgeously surreal Little Nemo comic strip or for his early animated short Gertie the Dinosaur (1914). But did you know that he also created some of the earliest examples of animated...
Images courtesy of the Library of Congress. Actor George Takei was once best known as Star Trek’s Mr. Sulu. He still is, of course, but over the last couple decades his friendly, intelligent, and wickedly funny presence on social media...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naDZ_7oSc70 New York isn’t the oldest city in the United States of America, and it certainly isn’t the newest. But it is, quite possibly, the American city where more layers of history coexist than any other, a quality that manifests...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0h8vAGCiRX0 The humorist Sandra Tsing Loh once described her generational cohort as “today’s young, highly trained, downwardly mobile professionals: ‘dumpies.’ We’re just emerging from years of college only to learn that there are no jobs available for people with our...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvwPKBXEOKE Anyone who keeps an eye on Hollywood knows — indeed, has been ever more frequently and anxiously informed — that the theater business is in trouble. If fewer of us than ever have been going out to the movies,...
Image via Wikimedia Commons I’ve just started reading J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit to my daughter. While much of the nuance and the references to Tolkienian deep time are lost on her, she easily grasps the distinctive charms of the characters, the...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHdud9km7bQ If pressed to pick the most international art figure of the past dozen years, one could do much worse than the Swedish artist-mystic Hilma af Klint, despite her having been dead for more than 80 years now. As evidenced...
