https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6LYjDQrGnY We tend to imagine old paintings as having a muted, yellow-brown cast, and not without reason. Many of the examples we’ve seen in life really do look that way, though usually not because the artist intended it. As Julian...
The personal became political during the ‘sex wars’ of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. With the sexual revolution already underway, Feminism’s second wave brought new issues to the agenda: pornography, consent, sex work and sadomasochism. The AIDS crisis also...
Photo of Karlheinz Stockhausen by Kathinka Pasveer via Wikimedia Commons You may hear the phrase “electronic music” and think of superstar dubstep DJs in funny helmets at beachside celebrity parties. Alternatively, you may think of the mercurial compositions of Karlheinz...
Bundesheer poster, Vienna, 30 November 2024. Image by Sarah Waring The poster needed a double take: three action-ready figures dressed in fatigues could have easily been advertising a film rather than the Armed Forces. Having never seen military propaganda on...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kwDVw0u4Kw In the decades after the Second World War, many countries faced the challenge of rebuilding their housing and infrastructure while also having to accommodate a fast-arriving baby boom. The government of the Netherlands got more creative than most, putting...
On 18 March 2025, Hungary’s ongoing legislative assault on LGBTQ+ people escalated with a law that strikes at the heart of basic human rights and fundamental European values. The Hungarian parliament passed a bill that effectively bans Pride events, citing...
In 1976 and 1977 an inspired music teacher in the small school district of Langley Township, British Columbia, a suburb of Vancouver, recorded his elementary school students singing popular songs in a school gym. Two vinyl records were produced over...
We can learn much about how a historical period viewed the abilities of its children by studying its children’s literature. Occupying a space somewhere between the purely didactic and the nonsensical, most children’s books published in the past few hundred...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-A_3t1-JJhw When Albert Camus won the Nobel Prize, he wrote a letter to one of his old schoolteachers. “I let the commotion around me these days subside a bit before speaking to you from the bottom of my heart,” the...
Image by Mario Casciano via Wikimedia Commons Music is dangerous and powerful, and can be, without intending to, a political weapon. All authoritarian regimes have understood this, including repressive elements in the U.S. throughout the Cold War. I remember having...
