120 articles
Showing 81–100 of 120 articles
In 1571, Michel de Montaigne retired to a tower library in his family chateau in the Dordogne, inscribed Greek and Latin maxims on the ceiling beams, and began writing what he called essais: attempts, trials, experiments in thought.
2026-05-17
The dinner table is the most underestimated piece of furniture in domestic architecture.
2026-05-16
Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, published in 1924, follows a young German engineer who visits a tuberculosis sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland, for three weeks and stays for seven years.
2026-05-16
Makaya McCraven, a drummer and producer based in Chicago, has developed a creative method that would have been technologically impossible a generation ago: he records live improvisations, then deconstructs and reassembles them in the studio, layering beats, samples, and effects to create compositions that are simultaneously acoustic jazz and electronic music.
2026-05-15
Blaise Pascal observed in the seventeenth century that all of humanity's problems stem from the inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
2026-05-14
The United Nations Security Council chamber in New York, designed by Arnstein Arneberg in 1952, seats delegates in a horseshoe arrangement facing each other across an open floor.
2026-05-14
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's Watchmen, published as twelve issues in 1986-87 and collected as a single volume, deconstructed the superhero genre with a narrative complexity that literary fiction rarely achieves.
2026-05-13
Terrence Malick's films are not difficult because they are obscure — they are difficult because they operate on principles that mainstream cinema has trained audiences to resist.
2026-05-11
Andrei Tarkovsky's 1975 film Mirror unfolds at a pace that contemporary audiences, trained by algorithmic content, may initially find unbearable.
2026-05-11
Jamel Shabazz began photographing the young people of Brooklyn and Harlem in the early 1980s, capturing the emergence of hip-hop culture with a warmth and intimacy that distinguished his work from the voyeuristic poverty tourism that characterised most media coverage of Black urban life.
2026-05-10
Opera's intimidation factor is inversely proportional to actual experience.
2026-05-10
Nevermind by Nirvana did not merely define the 1990s — it detonated the decade's arrival.
2026-05-09
The solitary museum visit is one of the most enriching and underappreciated activities available to a modern man.
2026-05-08
The most reliably interesting people at any gathering share a common trait: they read widely.
2026-05-08
Tom Ford's 2009 directorial debut, adapted from Christopher Isherwood's 1964 novel, is a film about grief so precisely observed that its beauty becomes almost unbearable.
2026-05-06
Jack Kerouac's 1957 novel, typed in a three-week burst on a single continuous scroll of paper, chronicles the cross-country journeys of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty during the late 1940s.
2026-05-06
Wes Anderson's 2014 film is often celebrated for its visual ingenuity and dismissed as style over substance.
2026-05-05
Nicolas Winding Refn's 2011 film is often remembered for its violence and its pink-cursive-on-the-poster aesthetic.
2026-05-05
Michael Mann's 1995 crime epic is remembered primarily for one thing: Al Pacino and Robert De Niro sharing a screen for the first time.
2026-05-05
The belt is the most utilitarian accessory in a man's wardrobe, yet it sits at the visual center of the body where it divides the silhouette in two.
2026-05-04