CULTURE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWJeWYnTMSY It can be tempt­ing to view the box office’s dom­i­na­tion by visu­al-effects-laden Hol­ly­wood spec­ta­cle as a recent phe­nom­e­non. And indeed, there have been peri­ods dur­ing which that was­n’t the case: the “New Hol­ly­wood” that began in the late nine­teen...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNwgh787umM On Tues­day, the car­di­nals locked them­selves into the Sis­tine Chapel, offi­cial­ly begin­ning the con­clave to elect the 267th pope. First for­mal­ized by Pope Gre­go­ry X in 1274, the con­clave (a word derived from the Latin words cum clave, mean­ing “with...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2XWeZ5r6wQ Today, 133 car­di­nals from around the world enter the con­clave to deter­mine the next pope, dur­ing which they’ll cast their votes in the Sis­tine Chapel. Despite being one of the most famous tourist attrac­tions in Europe, the Sis­tine Chapel...

Sev­er­al years back, Col­in Mar­shall high­light­ed George Orwell’s essay, “A Nice Cup of Tea,” which first ran in the Evening Stan­dard on Jan­u­ary 12, 1946. In that arti­cle, Orwell weighed in on a sub­ject the Eng­lish take seriously–how to make the per­fect...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2oVcOo37xU Despite devel­op­ing in Asia, as the Chi­nese form of a reli­gion orig­i­nal­ly brought over from India and lat­er refined in Japan, Zen Bud­dhism has long appealed to West­ern­ers as well. Some of that owes to the spare, ele­gant aes­thet­ics...

Who wants to be a bil­lion­aire? A few years ago, Forbes pub­lished author Rober­ta Chin­sky Matuson’s sen­si­ble advice to busi­ness­peo­ple seek­ing to shoot up that gold­en lad­der. These law­ful tips espoused such famil­iar virtues as hard work and com­mu­ni­ty involve­ment,...

You may believe that you’ve had a close enough view of Johannes Ver­meer’s Girl with a Pearl Ear­ring. You may have gone to The Hague and seen the paint­ing in per­son at the Mau­rit­shuis. You may have zoomed into the...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znKNQXo58pE When inven­tor Édouard-Léon Scott de Mar­t­inville sang a nurs­ery rhyme into his phonoau­to­gram in 1860, he had no plans to ever play back this record­ing. A pre­cur­sor to the wax cylin­der, the phonoau­to­gram took inputs for the study of...

Image via Here­ford Cathe­dral and Here­ford Map­pa Mun­di Trust At this point, every aspect of William Shake­speare’s life has pro­duced more spec­u­la­tion than any of us could digest in a life­time. That goes for his pro­fes­sion­al life, of course, but...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vjmQooFiXE Above, Lars Schmitz, a pro­fes­sor at Clare­mont McKen­na Col­lege, guides us “through a giant tree of life map­ping the evo­lu­tion of eyes in the ani­mal king­dom: how they work, why they’ve tak­en the form they have, and the evo­lu­tion­ary advan­tages...