The Albums That Rewired How Men Listen to Music
Marvin Gaye's What's Going On, released in 1971, represented a categorical rupture in how Black male artists could present themselves commercially.
Catherine Avery · 2026-05-11
Culture
Art, film, music, literature, and cultural commentary.
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Showing 101–120 of 168 articles
Edward Hopper and the Loneliness Worth Sitting With
Nighthawks, painted in 1942 and hung at the Art Institute of Chicago, has been reproduced so often that encountering the original requires a deliberate act of unseeing.
Catherine Avery · 2026-05-11
What Stoicism Actually Says (Not What LinkedIn Thinks)
The version of Stoicism circulating on social media — a productivity hack that equates emotional suppression with strength — bears almost no resemblance to the philosophy developed by Zeno of Citium in Athens around 300 BC.
James Alderton · 2026-05-11
The Documentaries That Changed Public Opinion
When An Inconvenient Truth premiered at Sundance in 2006, climate change was a partisan issue in American politics.
Oliver Ramsey · 2026-05-10
How to Curate a Film Collection Worth Revisiting
The streaming era has made virtually every film available and simultaneously made none of them feel essential.
Marcus Wei · 2026-05-10
The Architects Who Designed for Human Happiness
Alvar Aalto designed the Paimio Sanatorium in Finland in 1933 with a single organising principle: every architectural decision should serve the patient's recovery.
Oliver Ramsey · 2026-05-10
Why Learning Music Theory Sharpens Your Mind
Music theory is mathematics made audible.
Thomas Nakamura · 2026-05-10
The Forgotten Golden Age of American Short Fiction
Between 1920 and 1960, the American short story occupied a cultural position comparable to prestige television today — widely consumed, fiercely debated, and financially rewarding enough to sustain careers.
Thomas Nakamura · 2026-05-10
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How Design Thinking Applies to Everyday Life
Design thinking, as formalised by IDEO and Stanford's d.
Marcus Wei · 2026-05-10
The Case for Attending Live Theater
When a performance of Death of a Salesman reaches the scene where Willy Loman's sons realise their father has been lying to them for decades, something happens in a theatre that cannot happen on a screen: the audience becomes complicit.
Catherine Avery · 2026-05-10
Why Everyone Should Read One Philosophy Book a Year
Philosophy has an accessibility problem that is almost entirely self-inflicted.
Marcus Wei · 2026-05-10
The Photographers Who Defined Street Culture
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.
Daniel Hurst · 2026-05-10
How to Appreciate Opera Without Being an Expert
Opera's intimidation factor is inversely proportional to actual experience.
Daniel Hurst · 2026-05-10
The Graphic Novels That Deserve Literary Recognition
Art Spiegelman's Maus, which received a special Pulitzer Prize in 1992, remains the graphic novel most frequently cited in arguments for the form's literary legitimacy — and for good reason.
William Ashford · 2026-05-10
Why Analog Hobbies Make You More Creative
Neuroscience research from the University of California, San Francisco has demonstrated that activities involving hand-eye coordination — woodworking, drawing, pottery, model building — activate the brain's sensorimotor cortex in patterns that digital work does not replicate.
Catherine Avery · 2026-05-10
The Podcasts That Actually Challenge Your Thinking
The podcast landscape has become so saturated that finding genuinely challenging content requires deliberate curation rather than algorithmic browsing.
Sebastian Cole · 2026-05-09
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Why Classical Music Is Having a Quiet Renaissance
In 2023, Deutsche Grammophon — the world's oldest classical label, founded in 1898 — reported its highest streaming numbers in the company's history.
Sebastian Cole · 2026-05-09
How to Develop Taste in Wine, Art, and Everything Else
Taste is not innate — it is trained, and the training follows a remarkably consistent pattern regardless of the domain.
Catherine Avery · 2026-05-09
The Directors Whose Visual Language Changed Cinema
Stanley Kubrick's one-point perspective — that symmetrical vanishing point pulling the viewer into the frame's centre — became so distinctive that it now functions as visual shorthand for obsessive control and creeping dread.
Marcus Wei · 2026-05-09
Why Every Man Should Keep a Journal
Marcus Aurelius never intended his Meditations for publication.
William Ashford · 2026-05-09