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 · 2024-11-14
Culture
Art, film, music, literature, and cultural commentary.
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 · 2024-11-14
The Illustrators Whose Work Defined an Era of Book Covers
In 1945, Edward McKnight Kauffer designed a jacket for T.
James Alderton · 2024-11-13
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 · 2024-11-13
The Editors Who Shaped Twentieth-Century Fiction From Behind the Scenes
Maxwell Perkins at Charles Scribner's Sons received F.
William Ashford · 2024-11-12
On Finding Philosophy in the Produce Aisle
Consider the avocado.
William Ashford · 2024-11-12
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 · 2024-11-11
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 · 2024-11-11
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 · 2024-11-10
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 · 2024-11-10
The Playwrights Who Write for Audiences of Fifty
At the Finborough Theatre in Earl's Court, London, the audience capacity is fifty.
Sebastian Cole · 2024-11-09
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 · 2024-11-09
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 · 2024-11-08
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 · 2024-11-08
On Learning to Appreciate an Art Form You Once Dismissed
At twenty-five, I considered opera an extravagant exercise in melodrama.
Thomas Nakamura · 2024-11-07
How Punk Rock Became the Unlikely Grandfather of Minimalism
When the Ramones played their first show at CBGB on August 16, 1974, each song lasted roughly two minutes and used no more than four chords.
Sebastian Cole · 2024-11-07
The Design Principles Behind the World's Best Signage
When Massimo Vignelli and Bob Noorda redesigned the New York City subway signage system in 1966, they replaced a chaotic patchwork of hand-painted signs with a unified system using Helvetica, consistent colour coding, and clear directional logic.
Sebastian Cole · 2024-11-06
The Second Lives of Decommissioned Churches as Concert Halls
When a nineteenth-century church in Hamburg was deconsecrated, its Gothic nave possessed an acoustic reverberation time of nearly three seconds.
James Alderton · 2024-11-06
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 · 2024-11-05
What Cave Paintings Tell Us About the Impulse to Create
In September 1940, four teenagers stumbled into the Lascaux cave in the Dordogne region of France.
Sebastian Cole · 2024-11-05