Why Every Man Should Keep a Journal
Marcus Aurelius never intended his Meditations for publication.
William Ashford · 2024-09-15
Culture
Art, film, music, literature, and cultural commentary.
Showing 121–140 of 168 articles
The Albums That Defined Their Decade
Nevermind by Nirvana did not merely define the 1990s — it detonated the decade's arrival.
Daniel Hurst · 2024-09-15
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 · 2024-09-14
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 · 2024-09-14
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 · 2024-09-13
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 · 2024-09-13
The Paintings Every Man Should See in Person
No reproduction of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring prepares you for the painting's modest size — barely seventeen inches tall — or the way her gaze follows you across the room at the Mauritshuis in The Hague.
James Alderton · 2024-09-12
How Literature Can Make You a Better Conversationalist
The most reliably interesting people at any gathering share a common trait: they read widely.
Daniel Hurst · 2024-09-12
The Forgotten Art of Letter Writing
In 1944, a twenty-three-year-old soldier named Chris Barker wrote to his future wife Bessie Moore from a prisoner-of-war camp in Italy.
Oliver Ramsey · 2024-09-11
Why Travel Photography Matters More Than Travel Selfies
Steve McCurry's 1984 portrait of Sharbat Gula, the Afghan girl whose green eyes became the most recognisable photograph in National Geographic's history, succeeded because McCurry was looking outward.
William Ashford · 2024-09-11
The Writers Who Changed How Men See Themselves
When Raymond Carver published What We Talk About When We Talk About Love in 1981, he gave American men a literary mirror that reflected not heroism but quiet desperation — the unspoken tensions of working-class marriages, the beer cans accumulating on kitchen tables, the conversations that never quite arrived at honesty.
Sebastian Cole · 2024-09-10
How to Build a Personal Library That Means Something
The personal library of Umberto Eco reportedly contained thirty thousand volumes, and the Italian novelist was fond of pointing out that visitors invariably asked whether he had read them all.
Thomas Nakamura · 2024-09-10
The Case for Learning a Second Language After 30
At thirty-two, Gabriel García Márquez began studying French in Paris, a decision he later credited with reshaping the rhythmic structure of his prose.
Thomas Nakamura · 2024-09-09
Why Jazz Still Matters in the Age of Streaming
When Spotify's algorithm serves you a jazz playlist, it typically defaults to Miles Davis's Kind of Blue or Dave Brubeck's Take Five — monuments that deserve their status but represent a fraction of the genre's living pulse.
Catherine Avery · 2024-09-09
The Films That Defined Modern Masculinity
The cinematic models of masculinity available to men born after 1980 differ radically from those their fathers inherited.
Catherine Avery · 2024-09-08
How Architecture Shapes the Way We Think
Winston Churchill observed that we shape our buildings and thereafter our buildings shape us.
William Ashford · 2024-09-08
The Case for Reading Physical Books in a Digital Age
A 2019 study from the University of Valencia, analyzing twenty-five years of research across 171,055 participants, found that reading comprehension is significantly higher with physical books than with digital screens.
Thomas Nakamura · 2024-09-07
Why Every Man Should Visit a Museum Alone
The solitary museum visit is one of the most enriching and underappreciated activities available to a modern man.
Daniel Hurst · 2024-09-07
What Marcello Mastroianni Understood About Roman Sophistication
Marcello Mastroianni moved through Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita as if Rome itself were tailored to his proportions.
Thomas Nakamura · 2024-09-06
What André 3000 Understood About Genre-Defying Dress
André Benjamin, known as André 3000 of Outkast, has spent two decades dressing in a way that defies every category the fashion industry uses to organize itself.
Oliver Ramsey · 2024-09-06