https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rDZMeninVk Among my works, the one I like best is the Home that I have had built in Milan for accommodating old singers not favored by fortune, or who, when they were young did not possess the virtue of saving....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTA4OxSftHc The dark arts of “Hollywood accounting” make it difficult to determine film budgets with precision. But according to reasonable reckonings, James Cameron may have directed not just one but several of the most expensive movies of all time. The...
From the 18th century onward, the genres of Gothic horror and fantasy have flourished, and with them the sensually visceral images now commonplace in film, TV, and comic books. These genres perhaps reached their aesthetic peak in the 19th century...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSujxG5gJLM Whether or not we believe in any god, most of us here in the twenty-first century have the impression of divine rulers overlooking humanity with at least theoretical love and benevolence. They forgive us, they have plans for us,...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=playlist From Yale professor Paul North comes a chapter-by-chapter study of Karl Marx’s Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1. According to the description that accompanies the course on YouTube, this “book from 1872 is still the best guide to...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-G28iyPtz0 It takes about five hours to drive from Düsseldorf to Hamburg on the Autobahn. During that stretch, you can listen to Kraftwerk’s album Autobahn seven times — or if you prefer, you can loop its eponymous opening song thirteen...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T98825bzcKw You can’t beat the market. That, at least, is the advice we all encounter early on when first we try our hand at investing. Homespun though it may sound, the idea has academic roots: the Efficient Market Hypothesis, as...
A catchy tribute to mid-century Soviet hipsters popped up a few years back in a song called “Stilyagi” by lo-fi L.A. hipsters Puro Instinct. The lyrics tell of a charismatic dude who impresses “all the girls in the neighborhood” with...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjtoBrPxK0k The artificial language of Esperanto was conceived with high ideals in mind. In the eighteen-eighties, its creator L. L. Zamenhof envisioned it as the universal second language of humanity, and if it hasn’t achieved that status by now, it...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AV34h-YCMbE Before the New Year, we brought you footage of Russian polymathic inventor Léon Theremin demonstrating the strange instrument that bears his surname, and we noted that the Theremin was the first electronic instrument. This is not strictly true, though...
