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The kids can’t read. Such has been the implication, even the declaration, made by a wave of articles in recent years. But the statement needs some qualification: the kids in question are American; what they can’t read is entire books, especially literary fiction; and it isn’t just the kids in the first place. It would […]
Pitch to friends or family the idea of a trip to Mons, Belgium to visit the Mundaneum, and you may be met with a less-than-enthusiastic reception. That’s unfortunate, since such an experience could fundamentally change the way they regard technology they use every day. Though its name may seem to promise unrelieved dullness today, the […]
Harlem’s undergoing another Renaissance, and has been for years now. Crime’s down, real estate prices are up, and throngs of pale-faced hipsters are descending to check the area out. Sure, something’s gained, but something’s lost, too. For today’s holiday in Harlem, we’re going to climb in the Wayback Machine. Set the dial for 1932. Don’t […]
The world ended in the nineteen-sixties. Or rather, one world ended in the nineteen-sixties and gave way to another, a transition personified by no human beings more clearly than the Beatles. “They are lightning rods for so much that makes the sixties a revolutionary decade,” says The Rest Is History podcast co-host Tom Holland in the […]
It’s hard to imagine that the space-crazed general public needed any help getting worked up about astronauts and NASA in the early ’60s. Perhaps the wild popularity of space-related imagery was in part what motivated NASA administrator James Webb to create the NASA Art Program in 1962. Although the program’s handpicked artists weren’t edited or censored in any […]
PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel has spoken publicly on a variety of issues from contrarian entrepreneurship to technical stagnation to geopolitical struggle. Lately, he’s drawn more attention with extended remarks on what would seem an unexpected subject: the Antichrist, a seemingly enlightened but deceptively malevolent figure or movement bent on putting the world under innovation-stifling unified…
Who hasn’t pinned one of Saul Bass’ elegant film posters on their wall—either with thumbtacks above the dorm room bed or in frame and glass in grown-up environs? Or maybe it’s 70s kitsch you prefer—the art of the grindhouse and sensationalist drive-in exploitation film? Or 20s silent avant-garde, the cool noir of the 30s and […]
Not every 46-year-old comedy still gets laughs, but Airplane! seems only to get funnier with the decades. Some viewers too young to have caught it in its theatrical release even take the Benjaminian view of it as the kind of great work that creates its own genre: the rapid-fire deadpan joke machine, we could call it. […]
Art may seem inessential to those who make the big decisions in times of crisis. But it never seemed more necessary to artists working in the time of plague. So it was 366 years ago when Rembrandt painted a portrait of his son, Titus, in a monk’s robe in 1660. Eight years later, Titus was […]
You can still type a symbol originally invented for Cicero nearly 21 centuries ago — at least if you configure your keyboard properly. The character ⁊ appears in Unicode as U+204A, but is better known as the “Tironian et”: the “et” is Latin for “and,” and the “Tironian” comes from its creator, a man named […]
Twenty years ago, United States senator Ted Stevens drew long-lasting online ridicule by describing the internet as “a series of tubes.” While some commentators noted that the analogy wasn’t quite as outlandish as it seemed, most reacted with nothing more than amused bafflement. Where had Stevens come up with that image? Given that he was […]
