https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9B7fBPhWzU This year, YouTube celebrated its twentieth anniversary, prompting younger users to wonder what life could have been like before it. The fiftieth anniversary of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which premiered in April of 1975, has inspired similar...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87FjkqtK67o It’s hard to believe, but Marvin Gaye’s classic 1967 recording of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” was originally rejected by his record label. The song, about a man’s grief over hearing rumors of his lover’s infidelity, was written by...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9Dg-g7t2l4 “The Sound of Silence” Is the Most Metal Song of the Past Decade”: imagine that headline, and the contrarian culture piece practically writes itself. Not so long ago, Slate was notorious for publishing that kind of thing, but it...
When the Romans pushed their way north into the German provinces, they built (circa 90 AD) the Saalburg, a fort that protected the boundary between the Roman Empire and the Germanic tribal territories. At its peak, 2,000 people lived in the...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxY3CzN2Kkc As Mike Tyson once put it, with characteristic straightforwardness, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” Back in the time of the Roman Republic and the early Roman Empire, all of Rome’s enemies must have...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIDzA0YDso8 Welsh crooner Tom Jones made an unlikely comeback in the late 80s, covering Prince’s “Kiss” with Art of Noise. Then in the mid-90s, he showed up on The Fresh Prince of Bel Air to sing the mid-60s hit “It’s...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0ZMhhquL8c If you happen to go to the Louvre to have a look at Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, you’ll find that you can’t get especially close to it. That owes in part to the ever-present crowd of cellphone photographers,...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1fiOJDXA-E Combining pop music with opera was always the height of pretension. But where would we be without the pretentious? As Brian Eno observed in his 1995 diary, “My assumptions about culture as a place where you can take psychological...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8dcnh-4I6g Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater is a “house museum,” first designed as a residence, and now open to the public. In fact, as the institution’s director Justin Gunther explains in the Open Space video above, it’s “the first house of...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIqXprCArdo Miles Davis didn’t put out any studio albums from 1973 until the middle of 1981. In explaining the reasons for this lacuna in his recording career, Milesologists can point to a variety of factors in the man’s professional and...
