This falls under the category, “If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself.” In 1950, when Jack Kerouac released his first novel, The Town and the City, he was less than impressed by the book cover produced...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RCB6PbScjY Every now and again on social media, the observation circulates that Americans look back so fondly on their college years because never again do they get to live in a well-designed walkable community. The organization of college campuses does...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kt-wlM9Ucs “In our salad days, we are ripe for a particular movie that will linger, deathlessly, long after the greenness has gone,” writes the New Yorker’s Anthony Lane in a recent piece on movies in the eighties. “When a friend...
Since George Orwell published his landmark political fable 1984, each generation has found ample reason to make reference to the grim near-future envisioned by the novel. Whether Orwell had some prophetic vision or was simply a very astute reader of the...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMvP-cxjPpo Survey the British public about the most important institution to arise in their country after World War II, and a lot of respondents are going to say the National Health Service. But keep asking around, and you’ll sooner or...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxW18RDJk6A Ray Bradbury had it all thought out. Behind his captivating works of science fiction, there were subtle theories about what literature was meant to do. The retro clip above takes you back to the 1970s and it shows Bradbury giving a rather...
Before his signature works like The Atrocity Exhibition, Crash, and High-Rise, J. G. Ballard published three apocalyptic novels, The Drowned World, The Burning World, and The Crystal World. Each of those books offers a different vision of large-scale environmental disaster,...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2F9Wk3WtUU In a 2013 blog post, the great Ursula K. Le Guin quotes a London Times Literary Supplement column by a “J.C.,” who satirically proposes the “Jean-Paul Sartre Prize for Prize Refusal.” “Writers all over Europe and America are turning...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gol_p2aWrJg A middle-class Parisian living around the turn of the twentieth century would have to budget for services like not just water or gas, but also time. Though electric clocks had been demonstrated, they were still a high-tech rarity; installing...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCNZGJSI0Ls In November 1973, Scot Halpin, a 19-year-old kid, scalped tickets to The Who concert in San Francisco, California. Little did he know that he’d wind up playing drums for the band that night — that his name would end up etched in...
