CULTURE

Just out of curios­i­ty, and apro­pos of noth­ing, we asked Grok (the AI chat­bot cre­at­ed by Elon Musk) the fol­low­ing ques­tion: If a pres­i­dent of a super­pow­er want­ed to destroy his own coun­try, what steps would he take? Here’s what...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLkdWhqbqgY Nobody reads books any­more. Whether or not that notion strikes you as true, you’ve prob­a­bly heard it expressed fair­ly often in recent decades — just as you might have had you lived in the Roman Empire of late antiq­ui­ty....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxQxajcOyCI Here’s a remark­able short film of the great jazz gui­tarist Djan­go Rein­hardt, vio­lin­ist Stéphane Grap­pel­li and their band the Quin­tette du Hot Club de France per­form­ing on a movie set in 1938. The film was hasti­ly orga­nized by the...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JpCg-j_rHQ Ultra-tall high-ris­es against dark skies. A huge dis­tance between the rich and the poor. Rob­ber barons at the helm of large-scale indus­tri­al oper­a­tions that turn man into machine. Machines that have become intel­li­gent enough to dis­place man. These have...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npsB1xWh5hA ?si=l7KWVf9NZBUkPyM6 In July 1963, Bob Dylan made his first appear­ance at the New­port Folk Fes­ti­val. On open­ing night, he cap­ti­vat­ed a crowd of 13,000 with a per­for­mance of “Blowin’ in the Wind,” accom­pa­nied by Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, and...

Despite its sta­tus as one of the most wide­ly known and stud­ied epic poems of all time, Home­r’s Ili­ad has proven sur­pris­ing­ly resis­tant to adap­ta­tion. How­ev­er much inspi­ra­tion it has pro­vid­ed to mod­ern-day nov­el­ists work­ing in a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9U43te3ZFw April 10th will mark the 100th anniver­sary of F. Scott Fitzger­ald’s clas­sic Amer­i­can nov­el, The Great Gats­by. As A.O. Scott notes in a recent trib­ute, when first pub­lished, The Great Gats­by got off to a slow start. Ini­tial­ly, “Review­ers...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHJzbmmdZFg For all the means of com­mu­ni­ca­tion and exchange we’ve estab­lished between the cul­tures of the world, no mat­ter how dis­tant they may be from one anoth­er, we still have no tru­ly uni­ver­sal sin­gle human lan­guage. The rea­son could date...

Just look at this pho­to. Just look at this young girl’s smile. We know her name: O‑o-dee. And we know that she was a mem­ber of the Kiowa tribe in the Okla­homa Ter­ri­to­ry. And we know that the pho­to was...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKi9Zds5pMo Though cer­tain gen­er­a­tions may have grown up trained to take cov­er under their class­room desks in the case of a nuclear show­down between the Unit­ed States and the Sovi­et Union, few of us today can believe that we’d stand...