CULTURE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqMjvkhS29s The term sur­re­al­ism — or rather, sur­réal­isme — orig­i­nates from the French words for “beyond real­i­ty.” That’s a zone, we may assume, reach­able by only dar­ing, and pos­si­bly unhinged, artis­tic minds. But in fact, even the most down-to-earth among us...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMADDgsk7WE ?si=euaFB6jMJ_TPxRmf Down in Austin, Texas, music teacher Gavin Tabone leads the Bar­ton Hills Choir, made up of 3rd- through 6th-grade stu­dents. Backed by pro­fes­sion­al musi­cians, the choir per­forms a wide-rang­ing mix of music, from clas­sic pop and rock to...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsztuzyXdhY Trevor Noah end­ed his stint as the host of The Dai­ly Show a lit­tle over three years ago, but he’s made him­self into anoth­er kind of pop-cul­tur­al pres­ence since then. In evi­dence, we have his appear­ance above on the pop­u­lar pod­cast...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZiSxfCmOZY As any new par­ent soon finds out, there exists a robust mar­ket for prod­ucts, ser­vices, and media that promise to boost a child’s intel­li­gence. Some of these offer­ings come as close as legal­ly pos­si­ble to hold­ing out the promise...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhW0TrzWGmI As much as it is about every part of Dublin that ever passed by James Joyce’s once-young eyes, Ulysses is also a book about books, and about writ­ing and speech—as myth­ic invo­ca­tion, as seduc­tion, chat­ter, and rhetoric, ful­some and emp­ty....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6OmqXCsYt8 William Gib­son famous­ly observed that the future is already here, it’s just not even­ly dis­trib­uted. That line is often thought to have been inspired by Japan, which was already pro­ject­ing a thor­ough­ly futur­is­tic image, at least in pop­u­lar cul­ture, by the...

It took 90 years to complete. But, in 2011, scholars at the University of Chicago finally published a 21-volume dictionary of Akkadian, the language used in ancient Mesopotamia. Unspoken for 2,000 years, Akkadian was preserved on clay tablets and in stone inscriptions until...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7F16sC860s It was long ago that poly­the­ism, as the sto­ry comes down to us, gave way to monothe­ism. Human­i­ty used to have many gods, and now almost every reli­gious believ­er acknowl­edges just one — though which god, exact­ly, does vary....

Are we tru­ly in the midst of a human-caused sixth mass extinc­tion, an era of “bio­log­i­cal anni­hi­la­tion”? Many sci­en­tists and pop­u­lar sci­ence writ­ers say yes, using terms like “Holocene” or “Anthro­pocene” to describe what fol­lows the Ordovi­cian, Devon­ian, Per­mi­an, Tri­as­sic, and...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0G5mbbNdBM Each cul­ture has its own say­ings about the unique­ness and tran­sience of the present moment. In recent years, the Eng­lish-speak­ers have often found them­selves remind­ed, through the expres­sion “YOLO,” that they only live once. (The ques­tion of whether that...