https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kH0Yw0R84i0 Designing their new republic, the Founding Fathers of the United States of America looked back to reference points in classical antiquity. That instinct continued to shape American endeavors long thereafter, and not just political ones. Take the example of...
It is safe to predict that the second Trump presidency will go down in American history as the most divisive ever. Everything to say about its first six months has already been said: all we can do is keep track...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FMoWxQWHUE Purple may not be one of the most popular colors in the apparel of our age, but if you want it — as certain cultural figures have amply demonstrated — you can get as much of it as you...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rd1O-M_Vf2Q David Lynch loved his coffee. For decades, the filmmaker let coffee fuel his creativity, drinking five, six, even seven cups per day at Bob’s Big Boy. Famously, Lynch celebrated coffee in Twin Peaks (remember the line, “That’s a damn...
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...
