CULTURE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Hqm0dYKUx4 Grab a cup of cof­fee, put on your think­ing cap, and start work­ing through this video from Minute Physics, which explains why gui­tars, vio­lins and oth­er instru­ments can be tuned to a tee. But when it comes to pianos,...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=playlist If you enjoy mod­ern Japan­ese ani­ma­tion, you can no doubt name sev­er­al mas­ter­pieces of the form off the top of your head, whether acclaimed series like Neon Gen­e­sis Evan­ge­lion and Cow­boy Bebop to the work of cin­e­ma auteurs like...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=playlist It pays to think intel­li­gent­ly about the inevitable. And this course taught by Yale pro­fes­sor Shelly Kagan does just that, tak­ing a rich, philo­soph­i­cal look at death. Here’s how the course descrip­tion reads: There is one thing I can be...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1GO1HPLp7Y It speaks to the impor­tance of dis­cov­er­ies in physics over the past few gen­er­a­tions that even the dis­in­ter­est­ed lay­man has heard of the field­’s cen­tral chal­lenge. In brief, there exist two sep­a­rate sys­tems: gen­er­al rel­a­tiv­i­ty, which describes the physics...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXU3RfB7308 Note: With the sad pass­ing of James Earl Jones, at age 93, we’re bring­ing back a post from our archive–one fea­tur­ing Jones read­ing two great Amer­i­can poets, Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whit­man. These read­ings first appeared on our...

We could call the time in which we live the “Infor­ma­tion Age.” Or we could describe it more vivid­ly as the era of Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, Mar­tin Scors­ese and Steven Spiel­berg, Oprah Win­frey and Martha Stew­art, Bey­on­cé and...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4IMPlVlHDM A vague sense of dis­qui­et set­tled over Europe in the peri­od between World War I and World War II. As the slow burn of mil­i­tant ultra­na­tion­al­ism min­gled with jin­go­ist pop­ulism, author­i­tar­i­an lead­ers and fas­cist fac­tions found mount­ing sup­port among...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THlp_GAl5b0 Stan­ley Kubrick­’s 2001: A Space Odyssey has been praised in all man­ner of terms since it came out more than half a cen­tu­ry ago. An ear­ly adver­tis­ing cam­paign, tap­ping into the enthu­si­asm of the con­tem­po­rary coun­ter­cul­ture, called it “the...

His­to­ry escapes us. Events that changed the world for­ev­er, or should have, slide out of col­lec­tive mem­o­ry. If we’re point­ing fin­gers, we might point at edu­ca­tion­al sys­tems that fail to edu­cate, or at huge his­tor­i­cal blind spots in mass media....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mn2Dcy-NDTw Video essay­ists don’t nor­mal­ly retire; in most cas­es, they just drift into inac­tiv­i­ty. Hence the sur­prise and even dis­may of the inter­net’s cinephiles when Tony Zhou and Tay­lor Ramos declared the end of their respect­ed chan­nel Every Frame a...