CULTURE

Like the rock and roll rev­o­lu­tion of the 1950s, which shocked staid white audi­ences with trans­la­tions of black rhythm and blues, the pop­u­lar­i­ty of jazz caused all kinds of racial pan­ic and social anx­i­ety in the ear­ly part of the...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9x0tsuS4dk0 Among the won­ders to behold at the Vat­i­can Muse­ums are the larg­er-than-life forms of the titans of Greek phi­los­o­phy. It’s wide­ly known that at the cen­ter of Raphael’s fres­co The School of Athens, which dom­i­nates one wall of the...

Cofiwch Dryweryn (remember Tryweryn). The walls exhort us in bright red and white, from Llanrhystud in West Wales to Chicago. And the writing’s not only on the wall: it’s on a sticker on a lamppost outside Camden Market in North...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLD28a1Pdk0 “This is sup­posed to be my farewell tour,” says Ozzy Osbourne in a clip includ­ed in the Biog­ra­phy tele­vi­sion doc­u­men­tary above. He then gives the fin­ger and adds, “We’ll see.” The year was 1993, and indeed, there turned out...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyPe1Jahyfo Sal­vador Dalí and Luis Buñuel report­ed­ly car­ried rocks in their pock­ets dur­ing the pre­miere of their first film Un Chien Andalou, antic­i­pat­ing a vio­lent reac­tion from the audi­ence. It was a fair con­cern. The movie might be almost 90 years...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Rv36XkQojM The can­cel­la­tion of The Late Show with Stephen Col­bert—CBS insists it was pure­ly a “finan­cial deci­sion,” the result of declin­ing ad rev­enue in late night tele­vi­sion. Oth­ers see it as a dif­fer­ent kind of “finan­cial deci­sion,” a deci­sion by...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zwd9sEwN0Vw It’s tempt­ing, in telling the sto­ry of the Edith Farnsworth House, to break out clichés like “Peo­ple who live in glass hous­es should­n’t throw stones.” For the res­i­dence in ques­tion is made pre­dom­i­nant­ly of glass, or rather glass and...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEo3lf0-nxY Some YouTu­ber post­ed online a pret­ty nice clip of an espres­so shot being pulled from a La Mar­zoc­co FB80 espres­so machine at 120 frames per sec­ond. They rec­om­mend mut­ing the sound, then putting on your own music. I gave...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ex7f7KVl3I With the Hal­loween sea­son mere months away, the time has come to start think­ing about what fright­en­ing reads to line up for our­selves this year. Some of us may reach for Mary Shel­ley’s Franken­stein; or, The Mod­ern Prometheus, a...

For three decades after the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, political science and practical politics in Western Europe and North America very rarely addressed Moscow’s efforts to ‘reintegrate’ the ‘post-Soviet space’ (i.e., the former republics of the Union of Soviet...