CULTURE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXD8l8JFk6E Note: Yes­ter­day, Mar­i­anne Faith­full passed away at age 78. In her mem­o­ry, we’re bring­ing back a favorite from deep in our archive. It orig­i­nal­ly appeared on our site in June 2012. When you want to learn a thing or...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8--Ep_g9UY It’s prac­ti­cal­ly guar­an­teed that we now have more stu­pid peo­ple on the plan­et than ever before. Of course, we might be tempt­ed to think; just look at how many of them dis­agree with my pol­i­tics. But this unprece­dent­ed stu­pid­i­ty...

Sev­er­al years ago, Google launched a series of Career Cer­tifi­cates that will “pre­pare learn­ers for an entry-lev­el role in under six months.” Their first cer­tifi­cates focused on Project Man­age­ment, Data Ana­lyt­ics, User Expe­ri­ence (UX) Design, IT Sup­port and IT Automa­tion. And...

A 600-year-old manuscript—written in a script no one has ever decod­ed, filled with cryp­tic illus­tra­tions, its ori­gins remain­ing to this day a mys­tery…. It’s not as sat­is­fy­ing a plot, say, of a Nation­al Trea­sure or Dan Brown thriller, cer­tain­ly not...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRHUcU0RgOM Sev­er­al gen­er­a­tions of Amer­i­can stu­dents have now had the expe­ri­ence of being told by an Eng­lish teacher that they’d been read­ing Robert Frost all wrong, even if they’d nev­er read him at all. Most, at least, had seen his...

Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons In 590 AD, Pope Gre­go­ry I unveiled a list of the Sev­en Dead­ly Sins – lust, glut­tony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride – as a way to keep the flock from stray­ing into the thorny...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXyiK-zVKsE Frank Lloyd Wright is unlike­ly to be dis­placed as the arche­type of the genius archi­tect any­time soon, at least in Amer­i­ca, but even he had to start some­where. At nine years old, as archi­tec­ture YouTu­ber Stew­art Hicks explains in...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45-mOapch4k Even if you don’t speak Ital­ian, you can make a decent guess at the mean­ing of the word man­gia­mac­cheroni. The tricky bit is that mac­cheroni refers not to the pas­ta Eng­lish-speak­ers today call mac­a­roni, tubu­lar and cut into small...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHT39XcYVDk We have fea­tured Bene­dict Cum­ber­batch read­ing let­ters by Kurt Von­negut, Alan Tur­ing, Albert Camus, and Nick Cave, along with pas­sages from Kafka’s Meta­mor­pho­sis and Melville’s Moby Dick. It’s all pret­ty heady stuff. And now it’s time for some­thing com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent. Above,...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeYVCd84zek Imag­ine how many times some­one born in the eigh­teen-six­ties could ever expect to hear music. The num­ber would vary, of course, depend­ing on the indi­vid­u­al’s class and fam­i­ly incli­na­tions. Suf­fice it to say that each chance would have been...