CULTURE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=playlist Tom Lehrer died last week­end, more than four decades after rumors of his death had first gone into cir­cu­la­tion. He did­n’t both­er to con­tra­dict them, pub­licly claim­ing that he fig­ured they would “cut down on the junk mail.” That...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVMY_AZrqSU Whether willed, invol­un­tary, or a mix of both, the declin­ing lit­er­a­cy of col­lege stu­dents is by now so often lament­ed that reports of it should no longer come as a sur­prise. And yet, on some lev­el, they still do:...

Image by Dosse­man, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons In 2012, archae­ol­o­gists dis­cov­ered in South­ern Turkey a well-pre­served mosa­ic fea­tur­ing a skele­ton savor­ing a loaf of bread and a pitch­er of wine, sur­round­ed by the Greek words “Be cheer­ful and live your life.”...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=playlist Today, the Walt Dis­ney Com­pa­ny seems like one of those enti­ties that’s “too big to fail” — but dur­ing the Sec­ond World War, fail it near­ly did. Like the big-think­ing enter­tain­er-busi­ness­man he was, Walt Dis­ney him­self had been re-invest­ing...

Like the rock and roll rev­o­lu­tion of the 1950s, which shocked staid white audi­ences with trans­la­tions of black rhythm and blues, the pop­u­lar­i­ty of jazz caused all kinds of racial pan­ic and social anx­i­ety in the ear­ly part of the...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9x0tsuS4dk0 Among the won­ders to behold at the Vat­i­can Muse­ums are the larg­er-than-life forms of the titans of Greek phi­los­o­phy. It’s wide­ly known that at the cen­ter of Raphael’s fres­co The School of Athens, which dom­i­nates one wall of the...

Cofiwch Dryweryn (remember Tryweryn). The walls exhort us in bright red and white, from Llanrhystud in West Wales to Chicago. And the writing’s not only on the wall: it’s on a sticker on a lamppost outside Camden Market in North...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLD28a1Pdk0 “This is sup­posed to be my farewell tour,” says Ozzy Osbourne in a clip includ­ed in the Biog­ra­phy tele­vi­sion doc­u­men­tary above. He then gives the fin­ger and adds, “We’ll see.” The year was 1993, and indeed, there turned out...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyPe1Jahyfo Sal­vador Dalí and Luis Buñuel report­ed­ly car­ried rocks in their pock­ets dur­ing the pre­miere of their first film Un Chien Andalou, antic­i­pat­ing a vio­lent reac­tion from the audi­ence. It was a fair con­cern. The movie might be almost 90 years...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Rv36XkQojM The can­cel­la­tion of The Late Show with Stephen Col­bert—CBS insists it was pure­ly a “finan­cial deci­sion,” the result of declin­ing ad rev­enue in late night tele­vi­sion. Oth­ers see it as a dif­fer­ent kind of “finan­cial deci­sion,” a deci­sion by...