https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-Jhe_0A2ZQ According to Eurostat, as of 2023, the European Union had more than 8,556 kilometers of dedicated high-speed rail lines. However, the overall size of the European railway network has contracted by 1.3% between 2013 and 2023. This is hardly...
Historians are generally wary of commemorations – fireworks that dazzle the eye only to fade in the same instant. But they are also aware that ‘round number anniversaries’ can provide a unique opportunity to think about contemporary societies in their...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfqhJNUtiww If asked about your favorite dish, you’d do well to name something exotic. Gone are the days when a taste for the likes of Italian, Mexican, or Chinese cuisine could qualify you as an adventurous eater. Even expeditions to...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pV_BxnNfcR0 “Tomorrow Never Dies” couldn’t be made today, and not just because the Beatles already made it in 1966. Marking perhaps the single biggest step in the group’s artistic evolution, that song is in every sense a product of its...
Image by The USO, via Flickr Commons So you might think that if Stephen King – the guy who wrote such horror classics like Carrie and The Stand – were to rattle off his top ten favorite books, it would...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7-1gCc0Vnw Inexplicable as it may sound to readers of this site, there are movie-lovers who claim not to enjoy the work of Stanley Kubrick. But even his most steadfast non-appreciators have to hand it to him for The Shining, his...
If you head to the Louvre, make sure you visit the Mona Lisa, Venus de Milo, and Liberty Leading the People. But then swing by the Department of Greek, Etruscan, and Roman Antiquities. There you might find (no guarantee!) a...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMwdx0gM-l0 “Paradise Lost is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again,” Samuel Johnson wrote in the late eighteenth century. “None ever wished it longer than it is. Its perusal is...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rhv8iOY08TY Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue changed jazz. It changed music, period. So I take it very seriously. But when I see the animated sheet music of the first cut, “So What,” I can’t help but think of Charles Schulz’s...
Ever since Donald Trump’s victory in last year’s US presidential election, there has been frantic speculation about what it is the American Right really wants. The tendency is look to the leadership for clues. Who belongs to the inner circle,...
