https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khsNsa3-VqQ It’s safe to say that we no longer believe in the gods of the ancient world — or rather, that most of us no longer believe in their literal existence, but some of us have faith in their box-office...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JU1IVW6uqM0 From Rick Steves comes a thought-provoking documentary that revisits the rise of fascism in Europe, reminding us of how charismatic figures like Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler came to power by promising to create a better future for their...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=heh5XLwZVOY This week, the Guardian’s Zoe Williams profiled Ryan Holiday, a one-time public-relations whiz-kid who’s reinvented himself over the past decade as a speaker for the dead: specifically Epictetus, Seneca, and above all Marcus Aurelius, the figureheads of the ancient school...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_TlaxmOKqs In 2003, Disney released a six minute animated short called Destino, finally bringing closure to a project that began 57 years earlier. The story of Destino goes way back to 1946 when two very different cultural icons, Walt Disney...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFAoLHXou4s For obvious reasons, most art produced under oppressive regimes comes off as painstakingly inoffensive. For equally obvious reasons, the rare works that criticize the regime tend to do so rather obliquely. This wasn’t so much the case with The Hand,...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RHImYFJXQw This past Friday, the bassist of The Grateful Dead, Phil Lesh, passed away at age 84. Almost immediately the tributes poured in, most recognizing that Lesh wasn’t your ordinary bassist. As Jon Pareles wrote in the New York Times,...
Above, two-time Academy Award nominee Marshall Curry presents A Night at The Garden, a film that revisits a night in February 1939 when “20,000 Americans rallied in New York’s Madison Square Garden to celebrate the rise of Nazism — an...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PR2uKGdHsCE Haruki Murakami’s hit novel 1Q84 features a memorable scene in a taxicab on a gridlocked freeway whose radio is playing Leoš Janáček’s Sinfonietta. “It is, as the book suggests, truly the worst possible music for a traffic jam,” writes Sam Anderson...
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...
