CULTURE

You’ve like­ly heard the rea­son peo­ple nev­er smile in very old pho­tographs. Ear­ly pho­tog­ra­phy could be an excru­ci­at­ing­ly slow process. With expo­sure times of up to 15 min­utes, por­trait sub­jects found it impos­si­ble to hold a grin, which could eas­i­ly...

It may well be that the major piv­ot points of his­to­ry are only vis­i­ble to those around the bend. For those of us immersed in the present—for all of its deaf­en­ing sirens of vio­lent upheaval—the exact years future gen­er­a­tions will...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2WDB6tpIYM You could argue that, of all rock bands, that Pink Floyd had the least need for visu­al accom­pa­ni­ment. Son­i­cal­ly rich and evoca­tive­ly struc­tured, their albums evolved to offer lis­ten­ing expe­ri­ences that verge on the cin­e­mat­ic in them­selves. Yet from...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6tp8DCAJ-0 As many as a mil­lion peo­ple crossed the Gold­en Gate Bridge on foot to cel­e­brate the 50th anniver­sary of its con­struc­tion in 1987. More than a few of them would have remem­bered San Fran­cis­co as it was before it...

In addi­tion to the icon­ic scene in Jim Henson’s Labyrinth, or appear­ances in ani­mat­ed TV shows and video games, M.C. Esch­er’s work has adorned the cov­ers of albums like Mott the Hoople’s 1969 debut and the spec­u­la­tive fic­tion of Ita­lo...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjZvFY6__qw From Red Bul­l’s YouTube Chan­nel: “Ski moun­taineer Andrzej Bargiel becomes the first per­son to climb Mount Ever­est and ski back to Ever­est Base Camp with­out sup­ple­men­tary oxy­gen. After near­ly 16 hours climb­ing in the high alti­tude “death zone” (above...

Every­where you look, you can find traces of the ancient Roman civ­i­liza­tion from which the mod­ern West descends. That’s espe­cial­ly true if you hap­pen to be look­ing in Europe, though echoes of Latin make them­selves heard in major lan­guages used...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sm84wLGZbjA To imag­ine our­selves into the time of Leonar­do da Vin­ci, we must first imag­ine a world with­out such things as heli­copters, para­chutes, tanks, div­ing suits, robots. Yet those all exist­ed for Leonar­do him­self — or rather, they exist­ed in...

Rings with a dis­creet dual pur­pose have been in use since before the com­mon era, when Han­ni­bal, fac­ing extra­di­tion, alleged­ly ingest­ed the poi­son he kept secret­ed behind a gem­stone on his fin­ger. (More recent­ly, poi­son rings gave rise to a pop­u­lar Game of Thrones...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1bFJCjpGAM From the mighty Maya civ­i­liza­tion, which dom­i­nat­ed Mesoamer­i­ca for more than three and a half mil­len­nia, we have exact­ly four books. Only one of them pre­dates the arrival of Span­ish con­quis­ta­dors in the six­teenth cen­tu­ry: the Códice Maya de...