Howard Zinn’s Recommended Reading List for Activists Who Want to Change the World

Image by via Wikimedia Commons Back in college, I spotted A People’s History of the United States in the bags and on the bookshelves of many a fellow undergraduate. By that time, Howard Zinn’s alternative telling of the American story had been popular reading material for a couple of decades, just as it presumably remains a couple more decades on....

Feb 2022

Google App Uses Machine Learning to Discover Your Pet’s Look Alike in 10,000 Classic Works of Art

Does your cat fancy herself a 21st-century incarnation of Bastet, the Egyptian Goddess of the Rising Sun, protector of the household, aka The Lady of Slaughter? If so, you should definitely permit her to download the Google Arts & Culture app on your phone to take a selfie using the Pet Portraits feature. Remember all the fun you had back in 2018...

Feb 2022

Ivan Reitman’s First Film “Orientation” (1968)

Last night, we sadly learned of the passing of Ivan Reitman, director of many beloved comedies–Meatballs (1979), Stripes (1981), Ghostbusters (1984), and beyond. Born in Czechoslovakia in 1946–his mother an Auschwitz survivor and his father an underground resistance fighter–Reitman moved to Canada as a young child, where he eventually attended McMaster...

Feb 2022

The First Illustrated Edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses Gets Published, Featuring the Work of Spanish Artist Eduardo Arroyo

This year will see the long-delayed publication of a version of Ulysses that Joyce didn’t want you to read — not James Joyce, mind you, but the author’s grandson Stephen Joyce. Up until his death in 2020, Stephen Joyce opposed the publication of his grandfather’s best-known book in an illustrated edition. But he only retained the power actually to prevent...

Feb 2022

How the Riot Grrrl Movement Created a Revolution in Rock & Punk

The Riot Grrrl movement feels like one of the last real revolutions in rock and punk, and not just because of its feminist, anti-capitalist politics. As Polyphonic outlines in his short music history video, Riot Grrrl was one of the last times anything major happened in rock music before the internet. And it’s especially thrilling because it all started...

Feb 2022

The Great Courses Is Now Running a Big Spring Warehouse Clearance Sale

FYI: The Great Courses (formerly The Teaching Company) is running its Spring Warehouse Clearance Sale, offering a steep discount on a good number of its courses. If you’re not familiar with it, the Great Courses provides a very nice service. They travel across the U.S., recording great professors lecturing on great topics that will appeal to any lifelong...

Feb 2022

Nietzsche’s 10 Rules for Writing with Style

The life of Russian-born poet, novelist, critic, and first female psychologist Lou Andreas-Salomé has provided fodder for both salacious speculation and intellectual drama in film and on the page for the amount of romantic attention she attracted from European intellectuals like philosopher Paul Rée, poet Ranier Maria Rilke, and Friedrich Nietzsche....

Feb 2022

How Insulated Glass Changed Architecture: An Introduction to the Technological Breakthrough That Changed How We Live and How Our Buildings Work

When we think of a “midcentury modern” home, we think of glass walls. In part, this has to do with the post-World War II decades’ promotion of the southern California-style indoor-outdoor suburban lifestyle. But business and culture are downstream of technology, and, in this specific case, the technology known as insulated glass. Its development solved...

Feb 2022

That Time When the Mediterranean Sea Dried Up & Disappeared: Animations Show How It Happened

We hear a great deal today about the potential causes of rising sea levels. At a certain point, natural curiosity brings out the opposite question: what causes sea levels to fall? And for that matter, can a body of water so large simply vanish entirely? Such a thing did happen once, according to the PBS Eons video above. The story begins, from our perspective,...

Feb 2022

Zoo Hires Marvin Gaye Impersonator to Help Endangered Monkeys “Get It On”

This past weekend, monkeys residing at a British zoo got a special treat. A Marvin Gaye impersonator performed “Let’s Get It On” and “Sexual Healing,” all in an effort to help the monkeys, well, “get it on.” Located in Stafford, England, the Trentham Monkey Forest saw the performance as a novel way to get their endangered Barbary macaques to produce...

Feb 2022