https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RWcWSN4HhI The first globe—a spherical representation of our planet Earth—dates back to the Age of Discovery. Or 1492, to be more precise, when Martin Behaim and painter Georg Glockendon created the “Nürnberg Terrestrial Globe,” otherwise known as the “Erdapfel.” It was...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHmgF4ibmuk When many of us first learned of the RMS Titanic, it was presented first as one of history’s greatest ironies: the “unsinkable” ocean liner that went down on its maiden voyage. Of course, there’s a great deal more to...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIw0YJ6YM58 If you’ve fallen out of the habit of reading books, you’re certainly not alone. Consider how often posts circulate on social media (itself a big part of the problem) about studies showing a rapid increase in the number of...
Image via Wikimedia Commons A number of years ago, in a post on the pioneering composer of the original Doctor Who theme, we wrote that “the early era of experimental electronic music belonged to Delia Derbyshire.” Derbyshire—who almost gave Paul...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfduUFF_i1A Today, we’re revisiting a classic Monty Python skit. The scene is the 1972 Munich Olympics. The event is a football/soccer match, pitting German philosophers against Greek philosophers. On the one side, the Germans — Hegel, Nietzsche, Kant, Marx and,...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9_fwmdCyzo How to save those wet, damaged books? The question has to be asked. Above, you can watch a visual primer from the Syracuse University Libraries—people who know something about taking care of books. It contains a series of tips,...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zouFjgkE_4Y Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Richard the Third begins with the eponymous character uttering the famous line “Now is the winter of our discontent.” It ends at the Battle of Bosworth Field, by which point his villainous schemes have come...
And now for something entirely random. As noted on Metafilter, “Peter Tork from the Monkees had a strange little quirk. Sometimes, when other actors … were delivering their lines Tork would unthinkingly mouth their dialogue along with them, as seen...
We can go through most of our lives holding out hope of one day seeing in reality such works as van Gogh’s Sunflowers, Monet’s Haystacks, a clay tablet containing actual cuneiform writing with our own eyes, or the ancient Egyptian Temple of Dendur. We...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhu66Q8rfhI During Wimbledon a few years ago, a thread about King Felipe VI of Spain went viral. It was posted to the social media platform formerly known as Twitter by Derek Guy, author of the menswear blog Die, Workwear! “Very...
