“Sticks and stones may break my bones,” we chanted as kids, but “words will never hurt me.” The saying seems to both invite physical violence and deny the real effects
During the past year’s stretches of time at home, quite a few of us have attempted to introduce more plant life into our surroundings. By some accounts, indoor gardening ranks
From Chris Goto-Jones–now Dean of Humanities and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Victoria–comes a free course which was named ‘one of the best online courses of all time’ in
With The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, Victor Hugo intended less to tell a story than to mount a defense of Gothic architecture, which in the early 19th century was being demolished
Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan drew great acclaim for its harrowing depiction of “D-Day,” the 1944 Allied landing operation that proved a decisive blow against Nazi Germany. More specifically, Spielberg and his
DICTIONARY, n. A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic. — Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary Once upon a time, we were
From Peter Childs (Head of the Dyson School of Design Engineering at Imperial College London) comes a free course that explores creative thinking techniques, and how to apply them to
We tend to imagine Pompeii as a city frozen in time by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, inhabitants and all, but most Pompeiians actually survived the disaster. “The volcano’s molten rock,
In the 1980s, avant-garde composer, guitarist Glenn Branca began writing symphonies for electric guitars — dozens of them, all playing at once, creating unprecedented psychoacoustic effects — sometimes beautiful harmony,
Senet gaming board inscribed for Amenhotep III with separate sliding drawer, via Wikimedia Commons Games don’t just pass the time, they enact battles of wits, proxy wars, training exercises…. And