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“None of us has really the ability to understand our path until it’s over,” the celebrated graphic designer Milton Glaser mused less than a minute into the above video. The late Milton Glaser’s many contributions to pop culture—the I ❤ NY logo, the psychedelic portrait of a rainbow-haired Bob Dylan, DC Comics’ classic
Many an internet cinephile has wondered aloud if the Criterion Closet is a real place, or just a set thrown together to make videos when famous directors like Christopher Nolan, Francis Ford Coppola, or Jim Jarmusch drop by. It turns out indeed to exist, not only at Criterion’s offices in New York, but also elsewhere.
At the height of their productivity as Beatles, neither Paul McCartney nor John Lennon could read or write music notation. Clearly it didn’t keep them from making a cultural impact, and as with so much else in life, they regarded it humorously. As McCartney has said, they used to liken themselves to ancient Egyptian ph
Would anyone in their right mind sign up for a job that had a high risk of mortality/disability? Or a job where red hot metal is being hurled directly at your face? Back in the 1920s this was the lot of the men who built New York’s skyline, the men who constructed the Chrysler Building […]
Upon hearing of Tim Curry’s death last week, some of us could recall having seen him on stage: in Amadeus or Spamalot on Broadway, perhaps, though he also drew acclaim in the work of Stoppard, Brecht, and Shakespeare. For many more of us — perhaps all of us — it was his most memorable film and television […]
Many who read this will remember watching television on a black-and-white set at some point in their lives. Fewer will remember doing so because only black-and-white sets existed. Of course, your own experience will depend upon your country of origin. The United States began the transition to color television in 1953,
In some rare cases, adaptations and interpretations of a literary work can surpass the source. Despite hundreds of valiant efforts on the part of fans, filmmakers, game/toy designers, and radio producers, this has never been true of the fully-realized fantasy world in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rin
The Periodic Table of Elements lists the 118 chemical elements that make up everything in our world. Some you’re familiar with—Hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen, etc. Others maybe less so—Vanadium, Germanium, and Yttrium. According to the American Chemical Society, 44 of those 118 elements might disappear by century’s end. En
We’ve long joked about delaying bedtime in order to read the entire internet, but the prospect of actually doing so doesn’t sound as appealing as it used to. An ever-growing proportion of text online, we may sense, hasn’t been written by humans, but generated by artificial intelligence. One solution is to return to rea
The story of humans creating monstrous beings in their image may have perennial relevance, even if it seems specific to our contemporary cultural moment. What, after all, is Oscar Isaac’s AI inventor in Ex Machina but a 21st-century update of Victor Frankenstein? (Before Isaac went on to portray Victor himself in Guill
Marcus Aurelius did not have a smartphone. In fact, he didn’t have a phone of any kind, owing to the fact that he lived in the second century, though we can be reasonably certain that he commanded more than enough messengers to keep himself informed around the clock. That’s because he was the Roman emperor […]
If you have an iPhone, try pushing its side button three times in a row. Just like magic, the screen should turn from color into black-and-white, or rather grayscale. (To do the same on an Android phone, you’ll have to dive into settings, then “accessibility,” “vision enhancements,” and “color correction.”) Why would y
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