In 1975, the American sociologist Michael Hechter published a book on the evolution of the United Kingdom; fifty years on, its insights are strikingly pertinent to the travails of the post-Brexit union. Internal Colonialism (1975) applied the theory of ‘the...
At a 1998 conference on technology and life, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams once proposed the notion of a sentient puddle. Imagine it “waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXyxX5LBjUU The expression “YOLO” may now be just passé enough to require explanation. It stands, as only some of us would try to deny remembering, for “You only live once,” a sentiment that reflects an eternal truth. Some bodies of...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wP0JDiaCpWA It’s a sad fact that the vast majority of silent movies in Japan have been lost thanks to human carelessness, earthquakes and the grim efficiency of the United States Air Force. The first films of hugely important figures like...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ryx-eRSwSs This Is Spinal Tap came out more than 40 years ago. At the time, says director Rob Reiner in a recent interview at San Diego Comic-Con, “nobody got it. I mean, they thought I’d made a movie about a...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXG7bZwYKTw Let’s start with the basics: What is secularism? Well, according to the Enycolpedia Britannica, even scholars have a hard time defining it to the fullest, but we will do our best! In Andrew Copsons book, “What is secularism?” He...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoETYvwI7I0 It seems not to be documented whether the Santa Ana winds were blowing when Maya Deren and Alexander Hackenschmied shot Meshes of the Afternoon. But everything about the film itself suggests that they must have been, so vivid does...
We all know Marshall McLuhan’s pithy, endlessly quotable line “the medium is the message,” but rarely do we stop to ask which one comes first. The development of communication technologies may genuinely present us with a chicken or egg scenario....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKbNcR6ce7Y The history of medicine is, for the most part, a history of dubious cures. Some were even worse than dubious: for example, the ingestion of antimony, which we now know to be a highly toxic metal. Though it may...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hThz_m0FyM4 Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon is such a work of art that to split it up into nine tracks—like classic rock radio has done for years—always sounds nonsensical. How can you just end “Breathe” on that final...
