CULTURE

Most people’s to-do lists are, almost by def­i­n­i­tion, pret­ty dull, filled with those quo­tid­i­an lit­tle tasks that tend to slip out of our minds. Pick up the laun­dry. Get that thing for the kid. Buy milk, canned yams and kumquats...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8C5TgWHb82A Men­tion Fran­cis Bacon, and you some­times have to clar­i­fy which one you mean: the twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry painter, or the sev­en­teenth-cen­tu­ry philoso­pher? Despite how much time sep­a­rat­ed their lives, the two men aren’t with­out their con­nec­tions. One may actu­al­ly have been...

Pho­to by Paul Booth You val­ue deco­rum, pro­pri­ety, elo­quence, you trea­sure le mot juste and ago­nize over dic­tion as you com­pose polite but strong­ly-word­ed let­ters to the edi­tor. But alas, my lit­er­ate friend, you have the mis­for­tune of liv­ing in...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zM49Z6R1mKs Civ­i­liza­tion moved past the use of cas­tles long ago, but their imagery endures in pop­u­lar cul­ture. Even young chil­dren here in the twen­ty-twen­ties have an idea of what cas­tles look like. But why do they look like that? Admit­ted­ly,...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IpgTll6OjNo Once you hear Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1, you nev­er for­get it. Not that pop­u­lar cul­ture would let you for­get it: the piece has been, and con­tin­ues to be, rein­ter­pret­ed and sam­pled by musi­cians work­ing in a vari­ety of...

In the far reaches of our solar system, over 10 billion miles from the small blue dot we call home, the Pioneer probes are soaring into the oblivion of deep space. However, these cosmic messages in a bottle carry with...

Where do the hip­ster mixol­o­gists of Tokyo, Mex­i­co City and Brook­lyn take their inspi­ra­tion? If not from the Expo­si­tion Uni­verselle des Vins et Spir­itueux’ free col­lec­tion of dig­i­tized vin­tage cock­tail recipe books, per­haps they should start. An ini­tia­tive of the Muse­um of Wine and Spir­its on the Ile...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boTUOgka3LA Ancient Rome nev­er had an indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tion. Grant­ed, cer­tain his­to­ri­ans have object­ed now and again to that once-set­tled claim, ges­tur­ing toward large heaps of pot­tery dis­cov­ered in garbage dumps and oth­er such arti­facts clear­ly pro­duced in large num­bers. Still,...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xs0mP2cOmJs At the 1910 World’s Exhi­bi­tion in Brus­sels, Lud­wig Hupfeld unveiled the Phono­liszt-Vio­li­na, an instru­ment once dubbed “the eighth won­der of the world.” A lead­ing mak­er of auto­mat­ed instru­ments in Ger­many, Hupfeld built a com­pa­ny that pro­duced every­thing from phono­la...

‘Will the Slavic streams flow into the Russian sea? Or will it dry out? This is the question,’ wrote Alexander Pushkin in 1831. The line is from ‘To the Slanderers of Russia’, a triumphal ‘ode’ to Russia’s crushing of the...