CULTURE

Let’s time trav­el back to Leningrad (aka St. Peters­burg) in 1924. That’s when an uncon­ven­tion­al chess match was played by Peter Romanovsky and Ilya Rabi­novich, two chess mas­ters of the day. Appar­ent­ly, they called in their moves over the tele­phone. And then...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CF97mtu3qlE Zaha Hadid died in 2016, at the age of 65. She cer­tain­ly was­n’t old, by the stan­dards of our time, though in most pro­fes­sions, her best work­ing years would already have been behind her. She was, how­ev­er, an archi­tect,...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-u_xSDrWg68 Dur­ing World War II, Walt Dis­ney entered into a con­tract with the US gov­ern­ment to devel­op 32 ani­mat­ed shorts. Near­ly bank­rupt­ed by Fan­ta­sia (1940), Dis­ney need­ed to refill its cof­fers, and mak­ing Amer­i­can pro­pa­gan­da films did­n’t seem like a...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hBZ4P1zpaU Hunter S. Thomp­son has been gone for two decades now. When he went out, as the new Pur­suit of Won­der video on his life and work reminds us, he did so in a high­ly Amer­i­can man­ner: with a gun,...

James Joyce had a ter­ri­ble time with his eyes. When he was six years old he received his first set of eye­glass­es, and, when he was 25, he came down with his first case of iri­tis, a very painful and...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8HEwO-2L4w Until the end of his life, Carl Sagan (1934–1996) con­tin­ued doing what he did all along — pop­u­lar­iz­ing sci­ence and “enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly con­vey­ing the won­ders of the uni­verse to mil­lions of peo­ple on tele­vi­sion and in books.” When­ev­er Sagan appeared...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvUJvq_i7zQ Pop­u­lar cul­ture has long since claimed East­er as an occa­sion for trick­ster rab­bits, dyed-egg hunts, and marsh­mal­low chicks of unnat­ur­al hues — none of which are actu­al­ly in the Bible. Though that prob­a­bly does­n’t sur­prise you, you may not be...

It was sure­ly not a coin­ci­dence that the New York Times pub­lished its sto­ry on the tri­al of a cer­tain Gadalias and Sau­los this past Mon­day, April 14th. The defen­dants, as their names sug­gest, did not live in moder­ni­ty: the papyrus...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znwUCNrjpD4 You can be for­giv­en for think­ing the con­cept of “flow” was cooked up and pop­u­lar­ized by yoga teach­ers. That word gets a lot of play when one is mov­ing from Down­ward-Fac­ing Dog on through War­rior One and Two. Actu­al­ly,...

The Aus­tri­an mil­i­tary engi­neer Con­rad Haas was a man ahead of his time — indeed, about 400 years ahead, con­sid­er­ing that he was work­ing on rock­ets aimed for out­er space back in the mid-six­teenth cen­tu­ry. Need­less to say, he nev­er...