CULTURE

Blätter observes the eightieth anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki with an article by Hans Joas entitled ‘Peace or Freedom?’. In it the social philosopher discusses the ethical and political implications of the age...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELJlQ2o6NzQ At first, film sim­ply record­ed events: a man walk­ing across a gar­den, work­ers leav­ing a fac­to­ry, a train pulling into a sta­tion. The medi­um soon matured enough to accom­mo­date dra­ma, which for ear­ly film­mak­ers meant sim­ply shoot­ing what amount­ed...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjD93xVrZsM It can’t have been easy being Franz Kaf­ka. But then, it can’t have been much eas­i­er being Franz Kafka’s fiancée, as evi­denced by the cor­re­spon­dence read aloud by Richard Ayoade in the new Let­ters Live video above. “It is...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RwlFfTF3T0 One espe­cial­ly appeal­ing aspect of phi­los­o­phy, as a field of study, is that you don’t have to go any­where to learn it but the library. And these days, you don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly have to go there, now that so many...

The sto­ry of the Globe The­atre, the ances­tral home of Shakespeare’s plays, is itself very Shake­speare­an, in all of the ways we use that adjec­tive: it has deep roots in Eng­lish his­to­ry, a trag­ic back­sto­ry, and rep­re­sents all of the...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sYhbtk8jJc The Dev­il, the Beast, Beelze­bub, Lucifer, Satan: whichev­er name we hap­pen to call him, we know full well who the guy is — or at least, we think we do. In fact, the images and evo­ca­tions of that embod­i­ment...

Infer­no, Can­to X: Many artists have attempt­ed to illus­trate Dante Alighier­i’s epic poem the Divine Com­e­dy, but none have made such an indeli­ble stamp on our col­lec­tive imag­i­na­tion as the French­man Gus­tave Doré. Doré was 23 years old in 1855,...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R18R1YnfRjY No pop music can have inspired more scruti­ny than that of the Bea­t­les. Of course, intense and sus­tained atten­tion has been paid to every aspect of the band’s exis­tence — and, in the case of Paul McCart­ney, his pur­port­ed...

Growing up as a naive schoolboy in the 1990s, I was surrounded by the Belarusian language and Belarusian culture. My generation had been saturated by a wave of hasty Belarusification, and like many I saw this as something quite normal....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smYbNisW5yI There isn’t much place for dodec­a­he­dra in mod­ern life, at least in those mod­ern lives with  table­top role-play­ing. In the ancient Roman Empire, how­ev­er, those shapes seem to have been prac­ti­cal­ly house­hold objects — not that we know what...