The Cultural Significance of the Corner Barbershop
Truefitt and Hill, established on Old Bond Street in London in 1805, holds a Royal Warrant and has groomed every British monarch since George III.
Sebastian Cole · 2026-05-20
Culture
Art, film, music, literature, and cultural commentary.
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Showing 1–20 of 168 articles
Why Slow Television Is the Most Radical Programming on Air
In 2009, Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation aired a seven-hour, unedited film of the Bergen-to-Oslo train journey.
Oliver Ramsey · 2026-05-20
The Philosophy Hidden in Japanese Garden Design
The dry landscape garden at Ryoan-ji in Kyoto consists of fifteen stones arranged on raked white gravel within a walled rectangle.
Sebastian Cole · 2026-05-19
Why We Keep Returning to the Novels of John le Carré
George Smiley first appeared in Call for the Dead in 1961, a small, bespectacled, cuckolded intelligence officer who bore no resemblance to James Bond.
William Ashford · 2026-05-19
The Playwrights Who Write for Audiences of Fifty
At the Finborough Theatre in Earl's Court, London, the audience capacity is fifty.
Sebastian Cole · 2026-05-19
On the Underappreciated Skill of Active Listening
In 1957, psychologists Carl Rogers and Richard Farson published a paper called Active Listening that outlined a communication skill so fundamental it seems absurd that it needs teaching.
Catherine Avery · 2026-05-19
How the Photograph Album Became a Vanishing Art
In 1888, George Eastman introduced the Kodak camera with the slogan You press the button, we do the rest.
William Ashford · 2026-05-19
What the Great Libraries of the Islamic Golden Age Preserved for Us
In the ninth century, Caliph al-Mamun established the Bayt al-Hikma, the House of Wisdom, in Baghdad.
Daniel Hurst · 2026-05-19
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The Musicians Who Build Their Own Instruments
Harry Partch spent decades building an orchestra of instruments that could play the forty-three-tone scale he believed necessary to capture human speech.
James Alderton · 2026-05-19
How One Painting Can Change the Course of an Afternoon
I walked into the Frick Collection on a Tuesday afternoon with an hour to spare.
Marcus Wei · 2026-05-19
The Editors Who Shaped Twentieth-Century Fiction From Behind the Scenes
Maxwell Perkins at Charles Scribner's Sons received F.
William Ashford · 2026-05-19
On Finding Philosophy in the Produce Aisle
Consider the avocado.
William Ashford · 2026-05-19
The Illustrators Whose Work Defined an Era of Book Covers
In 1945, Edward McKnight Kauffer designed a jacket for T.
James Alderton · 2026-05-19
How Cinema Taught a Generation of Men to Cry
When the horse Artax sinks into the Swamp of Sadness in The NeverEnding Story, a generation of boys born in the late 1970s learned that grief could arrive without warning.
Sebastian Cole · 2026-05-19
Why Every City Needs a Cinema That Shows Old Films
The Metrograph on Ludlow Street in Manhattan opened in 2016 with a 35mm print of Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love.
Sebastian Cole · 2026-05-18
The Art Dealers Who Bet on Unknown Painters
In 1905, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler opened a tiny gallery on Rue Vignon in Paris and began buying paintings by an unknown Spanish artist named Pablo Picasso.
Daniel Hurst · 2026-05-18
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How Gordon Parks Used a Camera as a Weapon Against Injustice
In 1942, Gordon Parks was awarded a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship and arrived at the Farm Security Administration in Washington, D.
Catherine Avery · 2026-05-18
On the Beauty of an Unfinished Painting
Cezanne's The Large Bathers, housed in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, shows patches of bare canvas between its monumental figures.
James Alderton · 2026-05-18
The Novelists Who Write One Sentence a Day
James Joyce reportedly spent an entire day working on two sentences of Ulysses.
Marcus Wei · 2026-05-18
How the Criterion Collection Became a Film School in a Box
In 1984, Janus Films launched the Criterion Collection with a LaserDisc release of Citizen Kane, supplemented by the first-ever audio commentary track on a home video release.
Oliver Ramsey · 2026-05-18