ChatGPT and generative AI truly burst onto the scene in late 2022. There’s a good chance that the intersection between books, publishing and AI first crossed your radar sometime in 2023, quite possibly after The Atlantic’s investigation revealed hundreds of...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUxFzh8r384 Taking a first glance at the Babylonian Map of the World, few of us could recognize it for what it is. But then again, few of us are anything like the British Museum Middle East department curator Irving Finkel,...
Sometimes it can seem as though the more we think we know a historical figure, the less we actually do. Helen Keller? We’ve all seen (or think we’ve seen) some version of The Miracle Worker, right?—even if we haven’t actually...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77omYd0JOeA Many of us have put off a visit to Venice for fear of the hordes of tourists who roam its streets and boat down its canals day in and day out. To judge by the most visible of its...
As the object of study rather than the subject of communication, the so-called Middle East has long been a locus for advanced technologies of mapping. In the field of aerial vision, these technologies historically employed cartographic and photographic methods. The...
Orson Welles directed the greatest movie ever made, Citizen Kane, at age 25, with only a limited knowledge of the medium. When Paul McCartney was 25, he, along with his fellow Beatles, released the era-defining album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band....
The recent European parliamentary elections took place against the backdrop of widespread expectations by experts and the general public alike of a rightwing surge. The results both confirmed and confounded these expectations. This will have crucial consequences for the EU...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bs3HK3pxVAY In the 1950s, it was fashionable to drop Freud’s name — often as not in pseudo-intellectual sex jokes. Freud’s preoccupations had as much to do with his fame as the actual practice of psychotherapy, and it was assumed —...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78XPxvXYtBA The Olympic Games have their origins in antiquity, but their modern revival has also been going on longer than any of us has been here. Even the fifth Summer Olympics, which took place in Stockholm in 1912, has passed...
A recreation of the military sandals. (Photo: Bavarian State Office for Monument Preservation) Whether you’re putting together a stage play, a film, or a television series, if the story is set in ancient Rome, you know you’re going to have...
