Global World

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfYS39r9xHo For decades and decades, Warn­er Bros.’ Looney Tunes and Mer­rie Melodies car­toons have served as a kind of default chil­dren’s enter­tain­ment. Orig­i­nal­ly con­ceived for the­atri­cal exhi­bi­tion in the nine­teen-thir­ties, they were ani­mat­ed to a stan­dard that held its own against the sub­se­quent gen­er­a­tions of tele­vi­sion pro­duc­tions along­side which they...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqWa2Zbitss After mak­ing one of the grand­est entrances in music his­to­ry on the stages of East Vil­lage clubs, the BBC’s The Old Grey Whis­tle Test, and Sat­ur­day Night Live, the­atri­cal Ger­man new wave space alien Klaus Nomi died alone in 1983, a vic­tim of the “first beach­head of the AIDS...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bj7FJGrxtXY Mar­cel Duchamp did­n’t sign his name on a uri­nal for lack of abil­i­ty to cre­ate “real” art. In fact, as explained by gal­lerist-Youtu­ber James Payne in the new Great Art Explained video above, Ducham­p’s grand­fa­ther was an artist, as were three of his sib­lings; he him­self attained impres­sive tech­ni­cal...

Pho­to by Tamiko Thiel via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons How can we know whether a claim some­one makes is sci­en­tif­ic or not? The ques­tion is of the utmost con­se­quence, as we are sur­round­ed on all sides by claims that sound cred­i­ble, that use the lan­guage of science—and often do so in attempts...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lXv3Tt4x20 Read a nov­el by Charles Dick­ens, and you’ll still today feel trans­port­ed back to the Lon­don of the eigh­teen-twen­ties. Some of that expe­ri­ence owes to his lav­ish­ly repor­to­r­i­al descrip­tive skills, but even more to his way with dia­logue. Dick­ens faith­ful­ly cap­tured the vocab­u­lary of the times and places in...

Christo­pher Hitchens once wrote that there were three major issues of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry — impe­ri­al­ism, fas­cism, and Stal­in­ism — and George Orwell proved to be right about all of them. Orwell dis­plays his remark­able fore­sight in a fas­ci­nat­ing book review, pub­lished in March 1940, of Adolf Hitler’s noto­ri­ous auto­bi­og­ra­phy...

Image from New York Pub­lic Library, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons If you vis­it Osa­ka, you’ll be urged to see two old build­ings in par­tic­u­lar: Osa­ka Cas­tle and Shiten­nō-ji (above), Japan’s first Bud­dhist tem­ple. In behold­ing both, you’ll behold the work of con­struc­tion firm Kongō Gumi (金剛組), the old­est con­tin­u­ous­ly run com­pa­ny...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gkRTha6C3g Are your idle moments spent invent­ing imag­i­nary con­ver­sa­tions between strange bed­fel­lows? The sort of con­ver­sa­tion that might tran­spire in a pick­up truck belong­ing to Samuel Beck­ett, say, were the Irish play­wright to chauf­feur the child André Rene Rous­si­moff—aka pro wrestler André the Giant—to school? Too sil­ly, you say? Non­sense....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0A9M5wHBA4 In a 1956 New States­man piece, the British sci­en­tist-nov­el­ist C. P. Snow first sound­ed the alarm about the increas­ing­ly chasm-like divide between what he called the “sci­en­tif­ic” and “tra­di­tion­al” cul­tures. We would today refer to them as the sci­ences and the human­i­ties, while still wring­ing our hands over the...