https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0EySK4T2aY Contrary to somewhat popular belief, Chinese characters aren’t just little pictures. In fact, most of them aren’t pictures at all. The very oldest, whose evolution can be traced back to the “oracle bone” script of thirteenth century BC etched...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaffA9EyUgo It’s difficult to imagine that there was ever a time without the word “Kafkaesque.” Yet the term would have meant nothing at all to anyone alive at the same time as Franz Kafka — including, in all probability, Kafka...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXR5HLodsT8 In 2017, historian Timothy Snyder wrote the concise book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, which went on to become a New York Times bestseller. A historian of fascism (then at Yale, now at U. Toronto), Snyder...
As much as you may enjoy a night in with a book, you might not look so eagerly forward to it if that book comprised 314 folios of 1,971 papal letters and other documents relating to ecclesiastical law, all from...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmJ-4B-mS-Y Back in December, you hopefully thoroughly immersed yourself in The Map of Physics, an animated video–a visual aid for the modern age–that mapped out the field of physics, explaining all the connections between classical physics, quantum physics, and relativity. You can’t...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGib6vIuVds Artificial intelligence may be one of the major topics of our historical moment, but it can be surprisingly tricky to define. In the more than 30-year-old interview clip above, Isaac Asimov describes artificial intelligence as “a phrase that we...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3cab5IcCy8 She’s worked with Stanley Kubrick *and* “Weird Al” Yankovic, and helped Robert Moog in the development of his eponymous synthesizer. Wendy Carlos is also one of the first high profile transgender artists–credited as Walter Carlos for Kubrick’s A Clockwork...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_N04XVwlqg In most places across the world, speak the name of Dante, and your listeners will think of Inferno. Since its first publication more than 700 years ago, its depiction of Hell has become influential enough to shape the perceptions...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lotbZQ55SgU Although it’s certainly more plausible than hypotheses like ancient aliens or lizard people, the idea that slaves built the Egyptian pyramids is no more true. It derives from creative readings of Old Testament stories and technicolor Cecil B. Demille...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YjQLHCezOo Prada, Alfa Romeo, Pellegrino, Ferrari, Illy, Lamborghini, Gucci: these are a few Italian corporations we all know, though we don’t necessarily know that they’re all from the north of Italy. The same is true, in fact, of most Italian...
