CULTURE

A heads-up on a deal: Between today and Decem­ber 2, 2024, Cours­era is offer­ing a 40% dis­count on its annu­al sub­scrip­tion plan called “Cours­era Plus.” Nor­mal­ly priced at $399, Cours­era Plus (now avail­able for $239.40) gives you access to 7,000+ cours­es...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRzpDqqB2fk Burj Al Babas might have been con­struct­ed express­ly to attract the atten­tion of the inter­net. “Sit­ting near the Black Sea, the town is full of half-fin­ished, ful­ly aban­doned mini cas­tles — 587 of them to be exact,” write Archi­tec­tur­al...

Along with Astound­ing Sci­ence Fic­tion and The Mag­a­zine of Fan­ta­sy and Sci­ence Fic­tion, Galaxy Mag­a­zine was one of the most impor­tant sci­ence fic­tion digests in 1950s Amer­i­ca. Ray Brad­bury wrote for it–including an ear­ly ver­sion of his mas­ter­piece Fahren­heit 451–as...

Pho­tos on this page cour­tesy of the Falk­lands Mar­itime Her­itage  Few who hear the sto­ry of the Endurance could avoid reflect­ing on the apt­ness of the ship’s name. A year after set­ting out on the Impe­r­i­al Trans-Antarc­tic Expe­di­tion in 1914, it got...

Enter the Mush­room Col­or Atlas, and you can dis­cov­er the “beau­ti­ful and sub­tle col­ors derived from dye­ing with mush­rooms.” Fea­tur­ing 825 col­ors, each asso­ci­at­ed with dif­fer­ent types of mush­rooms, the inter­ac­tive atlas lets you appre­ci­ate the broad spec­trum of col­ors...

The web site Over­look Hotel has post­ed pic­tures of Stan­ley Kubrick’s per­son­al copy of Stephen King’s nov­el The Shin­ing. The book is filled with high­light­ed pas­sages and large­ly illeg­i­ble notes in the margin—tantalizing clues to Kubrick’s inten­tions for the movie. The...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRv_syz2DAc For 142 years now, Sagra­da Família has been grow­ing toward the sky. Or at least that’s what it seems to be doing, as its ongo­ing con­struc­tion real­izes ever more ful­ly a host of forms that look and feel not...

Image by J. F. Horra­bin, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons Bertrand Rus­sell saw the his­to­ry of civ­i­liza­tion as being shaped by an unfor­tu­nate oscil­la­tion between two oppos­ing evils: tyran­ny and anar­chy, each of which con­tains the seed of the oth­er. The best...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FC6jFoYm3xs F. W. Mur­nau’s Nos­fer­atu, far and away the most influ­en­tial ear­ly vam­pire movie, came out 102 years ago. For about ten of those years, Robert Eggers has been try­ing to remake it. He would­n’t be the first: Wern­er Her­zog cast Klaus...

Image by José-Manuel Ben­i­to, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons Some refer to the writ­ten Chi­nese lan­guage as ideo­graph­ic: that is, struc­tured accord­ing to a sys­tem in which each sym­bol rep­re­sents a par­tic­u­lar idea or con­cept, whether abstract or con­crete. That’s true of...