A Playlist of the 3,300 Best Films & Documentaries on Youtube, Including Works by Hitchcock, Kubrick, Errol Morris & Other Auteurs
?si=yCx1pqpcATHND90L Once upon a time, the most convenient means of discovering movies was cable television. This...
Meet Fanny, the First Female Rock Band to Top the Charts: “They Were Just Colossal and Wonderful, and Nobody’s Ever Mentioned Them”
When the Beatles upended popular music, thousands of wannabe beat groups were born all over the...
Read 20 Short Stories From Nobel Prize-Winning Writer Alice Munro (RIP) Free Online
Note: Back in 2013, when Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize in Literature, we published a...
Wes Anderson Directs & Stars in an Ad Celebrating the 100th Anniversary of Montblanc’s Signature Pen
One hardly has to be an expert on the films of Wes Anderson to imagine that...
Hannah Arendt Explains the Rise of Totalitarian Regimes–and the Strategies Needed to Combat Them
“Adolf Eichmann went to the gallows with great dignity,” wrote the political philosopher Hannah Arendt, describing...
George Orwell’s Political Views, Explained in His Own Words
Among modern-day liberals and conservatives alike, George Orwell enjoys practically sainted status. And indeed, throughout his...
A New Analysis of Beethoven’s DNA Reveals That Lead Poisoning Could Have Caused His Deafness
Despite the intense scrutiny paid to the life and work of Ludwig van Beethoven for a...
Jerry Seinfeld Delivers Commencement Address at Duke University: You Will Need Humor to Get Through the Human Experience
This weekend, Jerry Seinfeld gave the commencement speech at Duke University and offered the graduates his...
Aldous Huxley Explains How Man Became “the Victim of His Own Technology” (1961)
Just a couple of days ago, Apple CEO Tim Cook tweeted out a video promoting, “the...
The First Recording of Allen Ginsberg Reading “Howl” (1956)
Image by Michiel Hendryckx, via Wikimedia Commons Occasionally I slip into an ivory tower mentality in...
Watch an Enthusiast Drive the First Car Ever Made, the 1885 Mercedes Benz
In 1885, Karl Benz built what’s now considered the first modern automobile. According to the Mercedes...
Read the Uncompromising Letter That Steve Albini (RIP) Wrote to Nirvana Before Producing In Utero (1993)
Today, Steve Albini, the musician and producer of important albums by Nirvana, PJ Harvey, the Pixies...
Watch Animations Showing How Humans Migrated Across the World Over the Past 60,000 Years
Ex Africa semper aliquid novi. Attributed to various luminaries of antiquity, that saying (the probable inspiration...
A Bicycle Trip: Watch an Animation of The World’s First LSD Trip in 1943
On August 16, 1943, Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann was synthesizing a new compound called lysergic acid...
Download 131,000 Historic Maps from the Huge David Rumsey Map Collection
The world has changed dramatically over the past 500 years, albeit not quite as dramatically as...
4 Franz Kafka Animations: Watch Creative Animated Shorts from Poland, Japan, Russia & Canada
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari thought of Kafka as an international writer, in solidarity with minority...
What Is Religion Actually For?: Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury Weigh In
In the nineteen-sixties, the music media encouraged the notion that a young rock-and-roll fan had to...
Leonard Bernstein Introduces the Moog Synthesizer to the World in 1969, Playing an Electrified Version of Bach’s “Little Fugue in G”
When Wendy Carlos released Switched-On Bach in 1968, her “greatest hits” compilation of the Baroque composer’s...
High-Tech Analysis of Ancient Scroll Reveals Plato’s Burial Site and Final Hours
Even if you can name only one ancient Greek, you can name Plato. You can also...
RIP Paul Auster: Hear the Master of the Postmodern Page-Turner Discuss How He Became a Writer
In the Louisiana Channel interview clip from 2017 above, the late Paul Auster tells the story...
Artist Draws 9 Portraits on LSD During 1950s Research Experiment
During the 1950s, a researcher gave an artist two 50-microgram doses of LSD (each dose separated by...
A 5‑Hour Journey Through North Korean Entertainment: Propaganda Films, Kids’ Cartoons, Sketch Comedy & More
Over the second half of the twentieth century, South Korea became rich, and in the first...
Google Launches a New Course Called “AI Essentials”: Learn How to Use Generative AI Tools to Increase Your Productivity
This week, Google announced the launch of Google AI Essentials, a new self-paced course designed to...
André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto Turns 100 This Year
People don’t seem to write a lot of manifestos these days. Or if they do write...
Behold The Drawings of Franz Kafka (1907–1917)
Runner 1907–1908 UK-born, Chicago-based artist Philip Hartigan has posted a brief video piece about Franz Kafka’s drawings. Kafka,...
How Édouard Manet Became “the Father of Impressionism” with the Scandalous Panting, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863)
Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863) caused quite a stir when it made its public...
Bukowski Reads Bukowski: Watch a 1975 Documentary Featuring Charles Bukowski at the Height of His Powers
In 1973, Richard Davies directed Bukowski, a documentary that TV Guide described as a “cinema-verite portrait...
The Origins of Anime: Watch Early Japanese Animations (1917 to 1931)
Japanese animation, AKA anime, might be filled with large-eyed maidens, way cool robots, and large-eyed, way...
What Would Happen If a Nuclear Bomb Hit a Major City Today: A Visualization of the Destruction
One of the many memorable details in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to...
Pink Floyd Plays in Venice on a Massive Floating Stage in 1989; Forces the Mayor & City Council to Resign
When Roger Waters left Pink Floyd after 1983’s The Final Cut, the remaining members had good...
Inside the Beautiful Home Frank Lloyd Wright Designed for His Son (1952)
Being Frank Lloyd Wright’s son surely came with its downsides. But one of the upsides —...
Steven Spielberg Calls Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange “the First Punk Rock Movie Ever Made”
Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick are two of the first directors whose names young cinephiles get to...
Hear Flannery O’Connor Read “A Good Man is Hard to Find” (1959)
Flannery O’Connor was a Southern writer who, as Joyce Carol Oates once said, had less in...
A Guided Tour of the Largest Handmade Model of Imperial Rome: Discover the 20x20 Meter Model Created During the 1930s
At the moment, you can’t see the largest, most detailed handmade model of Imperial Rome for...
Watch Iconic Artists at Work: Rare Videos of Picasso, Matisse, Kandinsky, Renoir, Monet, Pollock & More
Claude Monet, 1915: We’ve all seen their works in fixed form, enshrined in museums and printed...
Humans First Started Enjoying Cannabis in China Circa 2800 BC
Judging by how certain American cities smell these days, you’d think cannabis was invented last week....
Daniel Dennett Presents the 4 Biggest Ideas in Philosophy in One of His Final Videos (RIP)
A week ago, Big Think released this video featuring philosopher Daniel Dennett talking about the four...
Discover the Singing Nuns Who Have Turned Medieval Latin Hymns into Modern Hits
We now live, as one often hears, in an age of few musical superstars, but towering...
Watch Stalker, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mind-Bending Masterpiece Free Online
“I feel like every single frame of the film is burned into my retina,” said Oscar-winning...
Beautifully-Preserved Frescoes with Figures from the Trojan War Discovered in a Lavish Pompeii Home
Image via Pompeii Archaeological Park Imagine visiting the home of a prominent, wealthy figure, and at...
Creating Your Own Custom AI Assistants Using OpenAI GPTs: A Free Course from Vanderbilt University
Last fall, OpenAI started letting users create custom versions of ChatGPT–ones that would let people create...
An Archive of Vividly Illustrated Japanese Schoolbooks, from the 1800s to World War II
If you want to appreciate Japanese books, it helps to be able to read Japanese books....
Free: Download the The Anarchist’s Tool Chest, The Anarchist’s Design Book, The Anarchist’s Workbench & Other Woodworking Texts
For Christopher Schwarz, American anarchism isn’t “about bombs and leather jackets; it’s about being an independent...
How the Berlin Wall Worked: The Engineering & Structural Design of the Wall That Formidably Divided East & West
More than thirty years after the formal dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, few...
Google & MIT Offer a Free Course on Generative AI for Teachers and Educators
FYI. Google and MIT RAISE have partnered to create a free course for teachers and educators,...
How the Year 2440 Was Imagined in a 1771 French Sci-Fi Novel
Many Americans might think of Rip Van Winkle as the first man to nod off and...
Why the Short-Lived Calvin and Hobbes Is Still One of the Most Beloved & Influential Comic Strips
If you know more than a few millennials, you probably know someone who reveres Calvin and...
Beavis and Butt-Head on SNL
If you need six minutes of comic relief, this might do the trick. For those who...
Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium: A Beautiful Digital Edition of the Poet’s Pressed Plants & Flowers Is Now Online
So many writers have been gardeners and have written about gardens that it might be easier...
Who’s Behind These Scammy Text Messages We’ve All Been Getting?: The Search Engine Podcast Demystifies the Global Scam
You have received those odd text messages from a stranger. (“Hi, This is Anita. Have you...