CULTURE

Kurt Von­negut’s life was not with­out its ironies. Fight­ing in World War II, that descen­dant of a long line of Ger­man immi­grants in the Unit­ed States found him­self impris­oned in Dres­den just when it was dev­as­tat­ed by Allied fire­bomb­ing. To...

Born 196 years ago, Russ­ian nov­el­ist Leo Tolstoy’s life (1828–1910) spanned a peri­od of immense social, polit­i­cal, and tech­no­log­i­cal change, par­al­leled in his own life by his rad­i­cal shift from hedo­nis­tic noble­man to the­olo­gian, anar­chist, and veg­e­tar­i­an paci­fist. Though he...

The phrase “April is the cru­elest month” was first print­ed more than 100 years ago, and it’s been in com­mon cir­cu­la­tion almost as long. One can eas­i­ly know it with­out hav­ing the faintest idea of its source, let alone its...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7AYnF5hOhuM I don’t know about you, but my YouTube algo­rithms can act like a nag­ging friend, sug­gest­ing a video for days until I final­ly give in. Such was the case with this video essay with the tan­ta­liz­ing title: “Twin Peaks...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_vbYmPm_zU Take a suf­fi­cient­ly long road trip across Amer­i­ca, and you’re bound to encounter some­thing or some­one Lynchi­an. Whether or not that idea lay behind Inter­view Project, the under­tak­ing had the endorse­ment of David Lynch him­self. Not coin­ci­den­tal­ly, it was...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaMwW074gOo Pri­vate Sna­fu was the U.S. Army’s worst sol­dier. He was slop­py, lazy and prone to shoot­ing off his mouth to Nazi agents. And he was huge­ly pop­u­lar with his fel­low GIs. Pri­vate Sna­fu was, of course, an ani­mat­ed car­toon...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WoDQBhJCVQ The 80-sec­ond clip above cap­tures a rock­et launch, some­thing of which we’ve all seen footage at one time or anoth­er. What makes its view­ers call it “the great­est shot in tele­vi­sion” still today, 45 years after it first aired,...

The Boss speaks the truth in a dinner. Find it on Instagram. Source link...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gv2aj2HWpGQ One would have imag­ined Sinéad O’Con­nor imper­vi­ous to any reac­tion from a hos­tile audi­ence, no mat­ter how vit­ri­olic. But even for a pub­lic fig­ure as out­spo­ken and unapolo­getic as her, it could all get to be a bit much...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqwqOLSe_d8 The Rocky Hor­ror Pic­ture Show–it start­ed first as a musi­cal stage pro­duc­tion in 1973, then became a cult clas­sic film in 1975. Now, a half-cen­tu­ry lat­er, it gets reborn as a retro video game. Sched­uled to be released by...