CULTURE

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...

Wal­ter Keane—supposed painter of “Big Eyed Chil­dren” and sub­ject of a 2014 Tim Bur­ton film—made a killing, attain­ing almost Thomas Kinkade-like sta­tus in the mid­dle­brow art mar­ket of the 1950s and 60s. As it turns out, his wife, Mar­garet was...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYHQcXVp4F4 There may be no more con­tentious an issue at the lev­el of local U.S. gov­ern­ment than edu­ca­tion. All of the socioe­co­nom­ic and cul­tur­al fault lines com­mu­ni­ties would rather paper over become ful­ly exposed in debates over fund­ing, cur­ricu­lum, dis­trict­ing,...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wa1O3nqW5hQ Whether or not we believe in auteur­hood, we each have our own men­tal image of what a film direc­tor does. But if we’ve nev­er actu­al­ly seen one at work, we’re liable not to under­stand what the actu­al expe­ri­ence of...

A new deal to start a new year: Cours­era is offer­ing a $200 dis­count on its annu­al sub­scrip­tion plan called “Cours­era Plus.” Nor­mal­ly priced at $399, Cours­era Plus (now avail­able for $199) gives you access to 90% of Cours­er­a’s cours­es, Guid­ed...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=playlist In the eight­ies, peo­ple lament­ed the atten­tion-span-short­en­ing “MTV-iza­tion” of visu­al cul­ture. By the mid-nineties, net­works were try­ing to fig­ure out how to get view­ers to sit through music videos at all. A solu­tion arrived in the form of Pop-Up...

Above, we have the Alu­lu Beer Receipt. Writ­ten in cuneiform on an old clay tablet, the 4,000-year-old receipt doc­u­ments a trans­ac­tion. A brew­er, named Alu­lu, deliv­ered “the best” beer to a recip­i­ent named Ur-Amma, who appar­ent­ly also served as the...