CULTURE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ym5n-ZZWUs As a founder of the “under­ground comix” move­ment in the 1960s, R. Crumb is either revered as a pio­neer­ing satirist of Amer­i­can cul­ture and its excess­es or reviled as a juve­nile pur­vey­or of painful­ly out­mod­ed sex­ist and racist stereo­types....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWOFxyQI9D8 The video above from YouTu­ber Alex Day includes clips from about 500 movies, and you’ve almost cer­tain­ly seen more than a few of them. Bat­tle­ship Potemkin, Dum­bo, Rear Win­dow, Dr. No, The God­fa­ther, E. T. the Extra-Ter­res­tri­al, Top Gun, Brave­heart, Glad­i­a­tor, Incep­tion: we’re not talk­ing about obscu­ri­ties here. Whether...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P27tTNP7SFc The scene is Farm Aid, 1985, attend­ed by a crowd of 80,000 peo­ple. The song is “How Blue Can You Get.” And the key moment comes at the 3:10 mark, when the blues leg­end B.B. King breaks a gui­tar...

A com­mon his­tor­i­cal mis­con­cep­tion holds that, up until a few cen­turies ago, every­one died when they were about 40. In fact, even in antiq­ui­ty, one could well make it to what would be con­sid­ered an advanced age today — assum­ing...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fI3Oh1ELmBI Andy Warhol did for art what the World Wrestling Fed­er­a­tion (WWF) did for wrestling. He made it a spec­ta­cle. He made it some­thing the “every­man” could enjoy. He infused it with celebri­ty. And, some would say, he cheap­ened it too. Look­ing...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0PA_hX8fVs A for­eign trav­el­er road-trip­ping across Europe might well feel a wave of trep­i­da­tion before dri­ving a ful­ly loaded mod­ern auto­mo­bile over a more than 2,000-year-old bridge. But it might also be bal­anced out by the under­stand­ing that such a...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvrfnE7Q-0w Per­haps no sin­gle per­son did more to pop­u­lar­ize Zen Bud­dhism in the West than Alan Watts. In a sense, Watts pre­pared U.S. cul­ture for more tra­di­tion­al­ly Zen teach­ers like Soto priest Suzu­ki Roshi, whose lin­eage con­tin­ues today, but Watts did...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MChhmACZk1I It would sur­prise none of us to encounter a young artist look­ing to cast off his past and make his mark on the cul­ture in a place like Williams­burg. But in the case of Man Ray, Williams­burg was his...

In William Faulkner’s 1938 nov­el The Unvan­quished, the implaca­ble Colonel Sar­toris takes dras­tic action to stop the elec­tion of a black Repub­li­can can­di­date to office after the Civ­il War, destroy­ing the bal­lots of black vot­ers and shoot­ing two North­ern car­pet­bag­gers....

We may appre­ci­ate liv­ing in an era that does­n’t require us to trav­el across the world to know what a par­tic­u­lar work of art looks like. At the same time, we may instinc­tive­ly under­stand that regard­ing a work of art...