CULTURE

In pre­vi­ous cen­turies, unless you were a mem­ber of the nobil­i­ty, a wealthy reli­gious order, or a mer­chant guild, your chances of spend­ing any sig­nif­i­cant amount of time with a Medieval tapes­try were slim. Though “much pro­duc­tion was rel­a­tive­ly coarse,...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-llumS2rA8I Pull up the Wikipedia page for Mariya Takeuchi’s “Plas­tic Love,” the 1984 sin­gle now known for re-pop­u­lar­iz­ing the genre of Japan­ese “city pop.” Then click the first of its links (not relat­ed to the lan­guage of the arti­cle itself),...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKx11LGIf8M Samuel Beck­ett: avant-garde drama­tist, brood­ing Nobel Prize win­ner, poet, and…gritty tele­vi­sion detec­tive? Sad­ly, no, but he had the mak­ings of a great one, at least as cut togeth­er by play­wright Dan­ny Thomp­son, cofounder of Chicago’s The­ater Oobleck. Some 35...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1bIKvHDNWI No mat­ter what coun­try we live in, we’ve all fan­ta­sized about tak­ing our own great Amer­i­can road trip, con­sid­er­ing a vari­ety of the infi­nite­ly many pos­si­ble routes. The most obvi­ous would be dri­ving between Los Ange­les and New York,...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hl05XGifKb4 John Waters’ rol­lick­ing com­mence­ment speech at The Rhode Island School of Design offered up some good one-lin­ers and a few pearls of wis­dom, though phrased, quite nat­u­ral­ly, in an irrev­er­ent way. Ready for some sage advice on what real­ly counts...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGh1JRJXehg Many of us grew up see­ing hard­back copies of Shō­gun on var­i­ous domes­tic book­shelves. Whether their own­ers ever actu­al­ly got through James Clavel­l’s famous­ly hefty nov­el of sev­en­teenth-cen­tu­ry Japan is open to ques­tion, but they may well have seen the...

Jean Giraud, aka Moe­bius, was a com­ic book artist who com­bined blind­ing speed with bound­less imag­i­na­tion. He shaped the look of Alien, Empire Strikes Back and The Fifth Ele­ment. He reimag­ined the Sil­ver Surfer for Stan Lee. And he is an acknowl­edged...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bZ0OSEViyo Ear­li­er this month, a North Car­oli­na man was charged with gen­er­at­ing songs using an arti­fi­cial-intel­li­gence sys­tem and con­fig­ur­ing bots to stream them auto­mat­i­cal­ly, thus rack­ing up some $10 mil­lion in ille­gal roy­al­ties. Though that amount no doubt star­tles many...

In the last year, screen­writer Todd Alcott’s hob­by has blown up into a legit side career. This Etsy sell­er isn’t ped­dling kom­bucha SCOBYs, let­ter press­ing new baby announce­ments, or repur­pos­ing old barns for use as cut­ting boards. No, Alcott’s crafty...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pYqXrFx6S8 These days, it feels as if you can’t go very long at all before scrolling past anoth­er announce­ment about some new tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ment (real­ized or sched­uled) relat­ed to space explo­ration. Some react to this by won­der­ing what could pos­si­bly...