Courtesy of The London Review of Books, you can now watch Eric Hobsbawm: The Consolations of History: In this documentary, Anthony Wilks traces the connections between...
We should just trust the experts. But wait: to identify true expertise requires its own kind of even more specialized expertise. Besides, experts disagree with each...
Recently, I was walking with a young relative who, upon passing a mural of the late Prince Rogers Nelson, looked up at me and asked, “who...
In April of 1967, Muhammad Ali arrived at the U.S. Armed Forces Examining and Entrance Station in Houston, Texas. “Standing beside twenty-five other nerve-racked young men...
https://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/secure/partiallyexaminedlife/PMP_91_4-9-21.mp3 What is with the weird relationship we Americans have with our pets? Many of us treat them as our babies, yet of course they’re our...
For the guitarist, alternate tunings expand the sonic possibilities of the instrument. But where, say, a progressive metal player will add a seventh or eighth string,...
In 2015, 3.8 billion years after “creativity emerged” out of “sheerest emptiness,” Kermit the Frog was tapped to give a talk on creativity at TEDxJackson. How did a local,...
In the history of recorded music, no medium has demonstrated quite the staying power of the phonograph record. Hearing those words, most of us envision a...
“Oh, would some Power give us the gift / To see ourselves as others see us!” wrote poet Robert Burns. “It would from many a blunder...
The Rolling Stones define the rock-and-roll band, as they have for nearly six decades now. Exactly how they’ve done so is thoroughly documented, not least by...
