The Only Illustrated Manuscript of Homer’s Iliad from Antiquity
Despite its status as one of the most widely known and studied epic poems of all...
The Great Gatsby: A Free Audio Book
April 10th will mark the 100th anniversary of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic American novel, The Great...
Did the Tower of Babel Actually Exist?: A Look at the Archaeological Evidence
For all the means of communication and exchange we’ve established between the cultures of the world,...
A Rare Smile Captured in a 19th Century Photograph
Just look at this photo. Just look at this young girl’s smile. We know her name:...
Superman vs. the KKK: Hear the 1946 Superman Radio Show That Weakened the Klan
Years ago, back in 2016, we featured a 1950 Superman poster that urged students to defend...
This Is What a Nuclear Strike Would Feel Like: A Precise Simulation
Though certain generations may have grown up trained to take cover under their classroom desks in...
The Best Photographer You’ve Never Heard Of: An Introduction to Tseng Kwong Chi
Once, the United States was known for sending forth the world’s most complained-about international tourists; today,...
Man Ray’s Surrealist Cinema: Watch Four Pioneering Films From the 1920s
Man Ray was one of the leading artists of the avant-garde of 1920s and 1930s Paris....
When Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German Pastor, Theorized How Stupidity Enabled the Rise of the Nazis (1942)
Two days after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, the Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer took to...
Spike Jonze Creates a New Short Film (aka Commercial) for Apple
?si=UQ0XdCH-cVGe26AC With his iconic Super Bowl ad in 1984, Ridley Scott began a tradition of accomplished...
When The Twilight Zone Imagined Fascism in America in a 1963 Episode Starring Dennis Hopper
Watch through The Twilight Zone, and you’ll find yourself spotting no end of familiar faces: Julie...
NASA Visualizes the Ocean Currents in Motion: A Mesmerizing View of Earth’s Underwater Highways
The mesmerizing video above lets you visualize the ocean currents around the world. Using data from...
How Dave Brubeck’s Time Out Changed Jazz
Music video essay maestro Polyphonic is back. What I dig about his videos is that he...
Every Hidden Detail of New York’s Classic Skyscrapers: The Chrysler, Empire State & Woolworth Buildings
Currently, the tallest buildings in New York City are One World Trade Center, Central Park Tower,...
The Most Iconic Electronic Music Sample of Every Year (1990–2024)
Hear a second or two of Vernon Burch’s “Get Up,” and you’re back in 1990; of...
Why There Isn’t a Bridge from Italy to Sicily – And Why the 2,000-Year-Old Dream of Building the Bridge May Soon Be Realized
We’ve all heard of the great American road trip. If you’ve ever dreamt of taking a...
Watch Dziga Vertov’s A Man with a Movie Camera: The 8th Best Film Ever Made
Of all the cinematic trailblazers to emerge during the early years of the Soviet Union –...
An Introduction to The Garden of Earthly Delights & Hieronymus Bosch’s Wildly Creative Vision
Hieronymus Bosch’s masterpiece of grotesquerie, The Garden of Earthly Delights, contains a young God, Adam and...
NYU Professor Answers Your Burning Questions About Authoritarianism
From WIRED comes this: NYU professor and “authoritarianism scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat joins WIRED to answer the...
Watch Alfred Hitchcock’s Groundbreaking, Six-Minute Trailer for Psycho (1960)
The early trailer for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho above describes the film as “the picture you MUST...
A 6‑Hour Time-Stretched Version of Brian Eno’s Music For Airports: Meditate, Relax, Study
Writing in his 1995 diary about his seminal ambient album Music for Airports, Eno remembered his...
A Tour of Ancient Rome’s Best Graffiti: “We Have Urinated in Our Beds … There Was No Chamber Pot” & More
Apart from the likes of bravo and pizza, graffiti must be one of the first Italian...
A Boy and His Atom: Watch The World’s Smallest Stop-Motion Film
What you’re watching above isn’t your ordinary film. No, this film — A Boy and His...
The Ancient Greeks Who Converted to Buddhism
It would hardly be notable to make the acquaintance of a Greek Buddhist today. Despite having...
Puppets of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Charles Dickens & Edgar Allan Poe Star in 1957 Frank Capra Educational Film
Produced between 1956 and 1964 by AT&T, the Bell Telephone Science Hour TV specials anticipate the...
Watch the Only Time Charlie Chaplin & Buster Keaton Performed Together On-Screen (1952)
Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton were the two biggest comedy stars of the silent era, but...
When Salvador Dalí Created a Chilling Anti-Venereal Disease Poster During World War II
As a New York City subway rider, I am constantly exposed to public health posters. More...
Bob Dylan Explains Why Music Has Been Getting Worse
One often hears that there’s no money to be made in music anymore. But then, there...
How the Moving Image Has Become the Medium of Record: Part 2
Eastman giving Edison the first roll of movie film, via Wikimedia Commons This piece picks up...
When Charlie Chaplin First Spoke Onscreen: How His Famous Great Dictator Speech Came About
Charlie Chaplin came up in vaudeville, but it was silent film that made him the most...
How the Moving Image Has Become the Medium of Record: Part 1
Image via Wikimedia Commons How did we get to the point where we’ve come to believe...
Watch “The Birth of the Robot,” Len Lye’s Surreal 1935 Stop-Motion Animation
Robots seem to have been much on the public mind back in the nineteen-thirties. Matt Novak...
Why “The Girl from Ipanema” Is a Richer & Weirder Song Than You Realized
Say what you want about YouTube’s negative effects (endless soy faces, influencers, its devious and fascist-leaning...
A Tour of the Final Home Designed By Frank Lloyd Wright: The Circular Sun House
Some remember the nineteen-nineties in America as the second coming of the nineteen-fifties. Whatever holes one...
Watch the Sci-Fi Short Film “I’m Not a Robot”: Winner of a 2025 Academy Award
Victoria Warmerdam, the writer and director of the short film, “I’m Not a Robot,” summarizes the...
Get 40% Off 3 Months of Coursera Plus & Access Unlimited Courses – Offer Ends March 9
Now through March 9, 2025, Coursera is offering 40% off a three-month subscription to Coursera Plus....
The Classic 1972 Concert Film Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii Gets Restored & Will Soon Hit IMAX Theaters
Today, when we watch genre-defining concert films like Monterey Pop, Woodstock, Gimme Shelter, or Ziggy Stardust...
Historian Answers Burning Questions About The Renaissance
Courtesy of Wired, historian Alexander Bevilacqua (Williams College) answers the internet’s burning questions about the cultural...
How Stephen King Foretold the Rise of Trump in a 1979 Novel
Nobody opens a Stephen King novel expecting to see a reflection of the real world. Then...
Carl Jung’s Hand-Drawn, Rarely-Seen Manuscript The Red Book
Despite his one-time friend and mentor Sigmund Freud’s enormous impact on Western self-understanding, I would argue...
How the Nazis Waged War on Modern Art: Inside the “Degenerate Art” Exhibition of 1937
Before his fateful entry into politics, Adolf Hitler wanted to be an artist. Even to the...
Andrei Tarkovsky’s Message to Young People: “Learn to Be Alone,” Enjoy Solitude
I remember the first time I sat down and watched Andrei Tarkovsky’s lyrical, meandering sci-fi epic...
Where The Simpsons Began: Discover the Original Shorts That Appeared on The Tracey Ullman Show (1987–1989)
When it first went on air in the late nineteen-eighties, Fox had to prove itself capable...
The Story Of Menstruation: Watch Walt Disney’s Sex Ed Film from 1946
From 1945 to 1951, Disney produced a series of educational films to be shown in American schools....
The Experimental Movement That Created The Beatles’ Weirdest Song, “Revolution 9”
As of this writing, the Beatles’ “Revolution 9″ has more than 13,800,000 plays on Spotify. This...
Kate Bush, Annie Lennox and 1,000 Musicians Protest AI with a New Silent Album
The good news is that an album has just been released by Kate Bush, Annie Lennox,...
Ella Fitzgerald Sings Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love” (1969)
In 1969, Ella Fitzgerald released Sunshine of Your Love, a live album recorded at the Venetian...
What Makes Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas One of the Most Fascinating Paintings in Art History
Diego Velázquez painted Las Meninas almost 370 years ago, and it’s been under scrutiny ever since. If...
When William Faulkner Set the World Record for Writing the Longest Sentence in Literature: Read the 1,288-Word Sentence from Absalom, Absalom!
Image by Carl Van Vechten, via Wikimedia Commons “How did Faulkner pull it off?” is a...
Jimi Hendrix Plays the Beatles: “Sgt. Pepper’s,” “Day Tripper,” and “Tomorrow Never Knows”
Who invented rock and roll? Ask Chuck Berry, he’ll tell you. It was Chuck Berry. Or...