CULTURE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_aYXYUT5l8 When the acclaimed cin­e­ma video-essay chan­nel Every Frame a Paint­ing made its come­back this past sum­mer, its cre­ators Tony Zhou and Tay­lor Ramos took a close look at the “sus­tained two-shot,” which cap­tures a stretch of dia­logue between two...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNbwMrBMGgE It’s hard to know where to start. This elec­tion comes down to whether or not we want to reward some­one who tried to sub­vert our democ­ra­cy four years ago. Whether we want to pre­serve the alliances that have kept...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9nTb86csPQ This past sum­mer, out came a trail­er for Mega­lopo­lis, the movie Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la has spent half of his life try­ing to make. It took the bold approach of open­ing with quotes from reviews of his pre­vi­ous pic­tures, and...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zhv5GVexW2E ?si=tyjBCsSNLIAgh7SM Writ­ten by Ron Grain­er, and then famous­ly arranged and record­ed by Delia Der­byshire in 1963, the Doc­tor Who theme song has been adapt­ed and cov­ered many times, and even ref­er­enced by Pink Floyd. In the hands of come­di­an Bill...

Kurt Von­negut’s life was not with­out its ironies. Fight­ing in World War II, that descen­dant of a long line of Ger­man immi­grants in the Unit­ed States found him­self impris­oned in Dres­den just when it was dev­as­tat­ed by Allied fire­bomb­ing. To...

Born 196 years ago, Russ­ian nov­el­ist Leo Tolstoy’s life (1828–1910) spanned a peri­od of immense social, polit­i­cal, and tech­no­log­i­cal change, par­al­leled in his own life by his rad­i­cal shift from hedo­nis­tic noble­man to the­olo­gian, anar­chist, and veg­e­tar­i­an paci­fist. Though he...

The phrase “April is the cru­elest month” was first print­ed more than 100 years ago, and it’s been in com­mon cir­cu­la­tion almost as long. One can eas­i­ly know it with­out hav­ing the faintest idea of its source, let alone its...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7AYnF5hOhuM I don’t know about you, but my YouTube algo­rithms can act like a nag­ging friend, sug­gest­ing a video for days until I final­ly give in. Such was the case with this video essay with the tan­ta­liz­ing title: “Twin Peaks...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_vbYmPm_zU Take a suf­fi­cient­ly long road trip across Amer­i­ca, and you’re bound to encounter some­thing or some­one Lynchi­an. Whether or not that idea lay behind Inter­view Project, the under­tak­ing had the endorse­ment of David Lynch him­self. Not coin­ci­den­tal­ly, it was...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaMwW074gOo Pri­vate Sna­fu was the U.S. Army’s worst sol­dier. He was slop­py, lazy and prone to shoot­ing off his mouth to Nazi agents. And he was huge­ly pop­u­lar with his fel­low GIs. Pri­vate Sna­fu was, of course, an ani­mat­ed car­toon...