Leonardo da Vinci Designs the Ideal City: See 3D Models of His Radical Design
Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Ray Bradbury: they and other 20th-century notables all gave serious thought to the ideal city, what it would include and what it...
Category: Culture
Hear the Earliest Recorded Customer Complaint Letter: From Ancient Sumeria 1750 BC
Three-thousand, seven-hundred, and seventy-one years ago, in the city of Dilmun, near Ur in Mesopotamia, there was a merchant named Ea-nasir. His business was in selling...
Bass Sounds: One Song Highlights the Many Different Sounds Made by Different Bass Guitars
If you’re a seasoned bass player, the diversity of bass sounds in the “Bass Sounds” videos here will hardly surprise you. Most other people — including...
Behold the Astronomicum Caesareum, “Perhaps the Most Beautiful Scientific Book Ever Printed” (1540)
Art, science, and magic seem to have been rarely far apart during the Renaissance, as evidenced by the elaborate 1540 Astronomicum Caesareum — or “Emperor’s Astronomy”...
Meet the Linda Lindas, the Tween Punk Band Who Called Out Racism & Misogyny and Scored a Record Deal
“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...
What Makes the Art of Bonsai So Expensive?: $1 Million for a Bonsai Tree, and $32,000 for Bonsai Scissors
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...
De-Mystifying Mindfulness: A Free Online Course by Leiden University
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...
The Creation & Restoration of Notre-Dame Cathedral, Animated
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...
Real D-Day Landing Footage, Enhanced & Colorized with Artificial Intelligence (June 6, 1944)
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...
Who Decides What Words Get Into the Dictionary?
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...
