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 · 2026-05-18
Culture
Art, film, music, literature, and cultural commentary.
Showing 21–40 of 168 articles
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 · 2026-05-18
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 · 2026-05-18
On Learning to Appreciate an Art Form You Once Dismissed
At twenty-five, I considered opera an extravagant exercise in melodrama.
Thomas Nakamura · 2026-05-18
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 · 2026-05-18
Why the Piano Bar Refuses to Die
The piano bar — that stubbornly analogue institution where a musician plays requests for a room of strangers who may or may not sing along — has survived the death of the cocktail lounge, the rise and fall of the nightclub, the karaoke revolution, and the pandemic.
Daniel Hurst · 2026-05-17
On the Pleasures of Reading Biographies of People You Dislike
Robert Caro's The Power Broker, a 1,344-page biography of Robert Moses — the urban planner who reshaped New York City through highways, bridges, and parks while destroying neighbourhoods and displacing hundreds of thousands of residents — is riveting precisely because its subject is detestable.
Daniel Hurst · 2026-05-17
How the Blues Travelled from Mississippi to Manchester
In 1962, a young Mick Jagger clutched a collection of Chess Records imports on a train platform in Dartford, England, and struck up a conversation with Keith Richards about Muddy Waters.
Thomas Nakamura · 2026-05-17
The Ceramic Artists Working in Cathedral-Sized Kilns
In the hills of Shigaraki, Japan, anagama kilns stretch up to twenty metres long, their brick chambers shaped like tunnels carved into the hillside.
Catherine Avery · 2026-05-17
What Magic Realism Offers the Practical Man
Gabriel Garcia Marquez once described magic realism not as fantasy but as an enlargement of reality.
William Ashford · 2026-05-17
The Architecture of Concert Halls and Why It Matters to Every Note
When the Berliner Philharmonie opened in 1963, its vineyard-style seating arrangement, designed by Hans Scharoun, placed the orchestra at the centre of the audience rather than at one end.
William Ashford · 2026-05-17
On the Moral Weight of Comedy
When Lenny Bruce was arrested on obscenity charges at the Cafe Au Go Go in Greenwich Village in 1964, the prosecution argued that his language was indecent.
Catherine Avery · 2026-05-17
How Dieter Rams Designed Calm Into Everyday Objects
In 1961, Dieter Rams designed the T 1000 world receiver radio for Braun.
James Alderton · 2026-05-17
The Photographers Who Shoot Only in Black and White, Still
Sebastiao Salgado spent six years photographing the world's last untouched ecosystems for his project Genesis, and he shot every frame in black and white.
Daniel Hurst · 2026-05-17
Montaigne's Essays and the Invention of Thinking Out Loud
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.
Daniel Hurst · 2026-05-17
The Forgotten Female Composers of the Romantic Era
In 1846, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel composed a piano cycle called Das Jahr, assigning each month a character piece of remarkable harmonic invention.
James Alderton · 2026-05-17
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The Photographers Who Documented an Entire City Block for Thirty Years
In 1969, Danny Lyon began photographing the demolition of Lower Manhattan's Washington Street neighbourhood — sixty acres of nineteenth-century commercial buildings razed to make way for the World Trade Center and Battery Park City.
Oliver Ramsey · 2026-05-16
What Bach Can Teach You About Structure in Any Field
Johann Sebastian Bach's fugues — compositions in which a single melodic theme is introduced, then systematically developed through repetition, variation, inversion, and combination — represent the most rigorous structural thinking in Western art.
Oliver Ramsey · 2026-05-16
The Cultural Weight of the Dinner Table
The dinner table is the most underestimated piece of furniture in domestic architecture.
Daniel Hurst · 2026-05-16
How David Lean Made Landscapes Into Characters
David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia, released in 1962, uses the Arabian desert not as a setting but as a protagonist — an antagonist, even, whose vastness, heat, and silence shape T.
Catherine Avery · 2026-05-16