CULTURE

On Jan­u­ary 13, 1931, the Soci­ety of Beaux-Arts Archi­tects held a ball at the Hotel Astor in New York City. Accord­ing to an adver­tise­ment for the event, any­one who paid $15 per tick­et (big mon­ey dur­ing the Depres­sion) could see...

Each Pub­lic Domain Day seems to bring us a rich­er crop of copy­right-lib­er­at­ed books, plays, films, musi­cal com­po­si­tions, sound record­ings, works of art, and oth­er pieces of intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty. This year hap­pens to be an espe­cial­ly notable one for con­nois­seurs...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65ojAfBBgVY If you want to under­stand the his­to­ry of music videos, you must con­sid­er a lot of things that are not obvi­ous­ly music videos. The Bug­gles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star,” the first selec­tion of MTV’s inau­gur­al broad­cast, must sure­ly...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kC6KbLIyoNk Pub­lic-tran­sit projects are the reli­gious build­ing endeav­ors of twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry Amer­i­ca, less because they’re moti­vat­ed by the belief in any par­tic­u­lar deity than by how much time and mon­ey they now require to com­plete. Take New York’s Sec­ond Avenue...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SLeFZFTIco 51 years ago, Hunter S. Thomp­son wrote Fear and Loathing on the Cam­paign Trail ’72, which “is still con­sid­ered a kind of bible of polit­i­cal report­ing,” not­ed Matt Taib­bi in a 40th anniver­sary edi­tion of the book. Fear and...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhhTr8wH2P4 There was a time when a com­pa­ny like Volk­swa­gen could com­mis­sion var­i­ous lumi­nar­ies to write let­ters to the future, then pub­lish them in Time mag­a­zine as part of an ad cam­paign. In fact, that time was­n’t so very long...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6TuOc0TvlI For long­time read­ers of Amer­i­can book jour­nal­ism, scrolling through the New York Times Book Review’s just-pub­lished list of the 100 best books of the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry will sum­mon dim mem­o­ries of many a once-unig­nor­able crit­i­cal fuss. At one time...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgWDtPVNQ7Y Upon step­ping into the hal­lowed Cri­te­ri­on Clos­et, stocked with hun­dreds of that cinephile video label’s finest releas­es, Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la speaks of a direc­tor who “believed in a film he want­ed to make, and used his entire for­tune, because the financ­ing...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8yewhGBOco Allow me to name just a few of the peo­ple I want to hear host­ing and curat­ing radio shows—former Sex Pis­tols’ singer John Lydon, for­mer Clash front­man Joe Strum­mer, for­mer Woody Guthrie imper­son­ator Bob Dylan.… Luck­i­ly for me, this ain’t just fan­ta­sy...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiTZWV_rdeU A Char­lie Brown Christ­mas uses a cast of ama­teur child voice actors, deals with the theme of sea­son­al depres­sion, and cul­mi­nates in the recita­tion of a Bible verse, all to a jazz score. It was not, safe to say,...