We can learn much about how a historical period viewed the abilities of its children by studying its children’s literature. Occupying a space somewhere between the purely didactic and the nonsensical, most children’s books published in the past few hundred...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-A_3t1-JJhw When Albert Camus won the Nobel Prize, he wrote a letter to one of his old schoolteachers. “I let the commotion around me these days subside a bit before speaking to you from the bottom of my heart,” the...
Image by Mario Casciano via Wikimedia Commons Music is dangerous and powerful, and can be, without intending to, a political weapon. All authoritarian regimes have understood this, including repressive elements in the U.S. throughout the Cold War. I remember having...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BdbfD2YOU4 It was at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival that Bob Dylan famously “went electric,” alienating certain adherents to the folk scene through which he’d come up, but also setting a precedent for the kind of quick-change musical adaptation that...
Religions take the cast and hue of the cultures in which they find root. This was certainly true in Tibet when Buddhism arrived in the 7th century. It transformed and was transformed by the native religion of Bon. Of the...
In his lifetime, Jackson Pollock had only one successful art show. It took place at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York in November 1949, and afterward, his fellow abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning declared that “Jackson has finally broken...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=playlist In 22 lectures, Yale historian Paul Freedman takes you on a 700-year tour of medieval history. Moving from 284‑1000 AD, this free online course covers “the conversion of Europe to Christianity, the fall of the Roman Empire, the rise...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqXRhqf7bvY ?si=yeo1Xsu2ZLuCpQbC Most scientists are prepared to answer questions about their research from other members of their field; rather fewer have equipped themselves to answer questions from the general public about what Douglas Adams called life, the universe, and everything....
From the Epic of Gilgamesh to thanatographies, literary works have long been a means to contemplate the death of a close individual: a parent, a partner, a child, a friend. Literary lament traditionally involves anthropomorphized animals in the mourning ritual....
There is a remarkable place on the border between Ukraine and Romania — a maze of waterways, lakes, canals, and islands that together form a unique ecosystem spanning 7,322 square kilometers. This entire area, called the Danube Delta, is protected...
