CULTURE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aimAeeDx2p4 In 1913, Ger­many, flush with a new nation’s patri­ot­ic zeal, looked like it might become the dom­i­nant nation of Europe and a real rival to that glob­al super­pow­er Great Britain. Then it hit the buz­z­saw of World War I....

H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds has ter­ri­fied and fas­ci­nat­ed read­ers and writ­ers for decades since its 1898 pub­li­ca­tion and has inspired numer­ous adap­ta­tions. The most noto­ri­ous use of Wells’ book was by Orson Welles, whom the author called “my...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeAx3QZ7eRs Peo­ple under­stand evo­lu­tion in all sorts of dif­fer­ent ways. We’ve all heard a vari­ety of folk expla­na­tions of that all-impor­tant phe­nom­e­non, from “sur­vival of the fittest” to “humans come from mon­keys,” that run the spec­trum from broad­ly cor­rect to...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKwlp1Ap9XA Neil deGrasse Tyson has spent his career talk­ing up not just sci­ence itself, but also its prac­ti­tion­ers. If asked to name the great­est sci­en­tist of all time, one might expect him to need a minute to think about it...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bL9iJJICOLc And now for a good use of AI. The UK-based tele­com com­pa­ny O2 has devel­oped a chat­bot (“named Daisy”) that per­forms a noble task. Imper­son­at­ing an elder­ly grand­moth­er, the chat­bot engages with inter­net fraud­sters and then sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly frus­trates them...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhTS_RSQxw4 It’s Fri­day, which means that tonight, many of us will sit down to watch a movie with our fam­i­ly, our friends, our sig­nif­i­cant oth­er, or — for some cinephiles, best of all — by our­selves. If you haven’t yet...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dK05vRrQEE Music is often described as the most abstract of all the arts, and arguably the least visu­al as well. But these qual­i­ties, which seem so basic to the nature of the form, have been chal­lenged for at least three...

As you’ve prob­a­bly noticed if you’re a reg­u­lar read­er of this site, we’re big fans of book illus­tra­tion, par­tic­u­lar­ly that from the form’s gold­en age—the late 18th and 19th century—before pho­tog­ra­phy took over as the dom­i­nant visu­al medi­um. But while...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tt6WQYtefXA We made sand think: this phrase is used from time to time to evoke the par­tic­u­lar tech­no­log­i­cal won­ders of our age, espe­cial­ly since arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence seems to be back on the slate of pos­si­bil­i­ties. While there would be no...

Char­lie Chap­lin start­ed appear­ing in his first films in 1914—40 films, to be precise—and, by 1915, the Unit­ed States had a major case of “Chap­lini­tis.” Chap­lin mus­tach­es were sud­den­ly pop­ping up every­where–as were Chap­lin imi­ta­tors and Chap­lin look-alike con­tests. A young Bob Hope...