CULTURE

As a young ama­teur painter and future art school dropout, I fre­quent­ly found myself haunt­ed by the faces of two artists, that famous­ly odd cou­ple from my favorite art his­to­ry novelization—and Kirk Dou­glas role and Iggy Pop song—Lust for Life....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFPFYg-HZD0 Die Aben­teuer des Prinzen Achmed, or The Adven­tures of Prince Achmed, lays fair claim to being the ear­li­est ani­mat­ed fea­ture film in exis­tence. If we do grant it that title, it beats the next con­tender by more than a decade. While Prince Achmed came...

For almost two hun­dred years, Eng­lish gen­tle­men could not con­sid­er their edu­ca­tion com­plete until they had tak­en the “Grand Tour” of Europe, usu­al­ly cul­mi­nat­ing in Naples, “raga­muf­fin cap­i­tal of the Ital­ian south,” writes Ian Thom­son at The Spec­ta­tor. Italy was usu­al­ly the...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LCBqaVzvuY ?si=HOvgnTtB4xSNqpNE In 1894, archae­ol­o­gist Édouard Piette dis­cov­ered the “Venus of Brassem­pouy,” oth­er­wise known as the “Lady with the Hood.” Unearthed in south­west­ern France and dat­ing to around 25,000 BCE, this carv­ing rep­re­sents the ear­li­est real­is­tic depic­tion of a human face....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyhzgNdSnbQ Juan Pujol Gar­cía was one of the rare indi­vid­u­als whose par­tic­i­pa­tion in World War II made him a Mem­ber of the Order of the British Empire and earned him the Iron Cross. He gained that unlike­ly dis­tinc­tion in per­haps...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFdvbf9bomM A vast, mis­er­able pro­le­tari­at squan­ders its days in mean­ing­less toil. Soci­ety is under the con­trol of ultra-wealthy busi­ness mag­nates. In order to paci­fy the under­class, the rul­ing class pins its hopes on a tech­no­log­i­cal solu­tion: arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence. Wel­come to...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ivqWN4L3zU Sci­ence and engi­neer­ing may be con­flat­ed to some degree in the pub­lic mind, but any­one who’s spent much time in an aca­d­e­m­ic depart­ment belong­ing to one or the oth­er of those branch­es of endeav­or knows how insis­tent­ly dis­tinc­tions can...

Wel­come to The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights. You’ll find no angel­ic strings here. Those are reserved for first-class cit­i­zens whose vir­tu­ous lives earned them pas­sage to the upper­most heights. Down below, stringed instru­ments pro­duce the most hell­ish sort of cacoph­o­ny,...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTIOl4oMRuA The Silk Road’s long peri­od of high activ­i­ty spanned the sec­ond cen­tu­ry BC and the fif­teenth cen­tu­ry AD, but its name was­n’t coined until more than 400 years after that. Schol­ars have argued it prac­ti­cal­ly ever since, giv­en that...

We seem to be liv­ing through yet anoth­er major moment for pod­cast­ing. Over the past two decades, the medi­um has gone from niche exper­i­ment to main­stream habit, becom­ing a reg­u­lar part of how we learn, enter­tain our­selves, and pass the...