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- The Dylatov Pass Incident: Has One of the Biggest Soviet Mysteries Been Solved?by Colin Marshall on June 9, 2025 at 9:00 am
Most of us would go out of our way not to set foot anywhere near a place the local natives refer to as “Dead Mountain.” That didn’t stop the Dyatlov Hiking Group, who set out on a sixteen-day skiing expedition across the northern Urals in late January of 1959. Experienced and intrepid, those ten young
- Hear What Shakespeare Sounded Like in the Original Pronunciationby OC on June 9, 2025 at 8:00 am
What did Shakespeare’s English sound like to Shakespeare? To his audience? And how can we know such a thing as the phonetic character of the language spoken 400 years ago? These questions and more are addressed in the video above, which profiles a very popular experiment at London’s Globe Theatre, the 1994 reconstruction of Shakespeare’s
- An Introduction to George Orwell’s 1984 and How Power Manufactures Truthby Colin Marshall on June 6, 2025 at 9:00 am
Soon after the first election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four became a bestseller again. Shooting to the top of the American charts, the novel that inspired the term “Orwellian” passed Danielle Steel’s latest opus, the poetry of Rupi Kaur, the eleventh Diary of a Wimpy Kid
- Talking Heads Release the First Official Video for “Psycho Killer”: Watch It Onlineby OC on June 6, 2025 at 8:00 am
On social media, the Talking Heads teased a major announcement on June 5th, leading fans to wonder if a reunion—41 years after their last tour—might finally be in the offing. As one fan put it, “If this is a tour announcement, I am going to freak out!” Alas, we didn’t quite get that. (Maybe next
- When the State Department Used Dizzy Gillespie and Jazz to Fight the Cold War (1956)by Colin Marshall on June 5, 2025 at 9:00 am
It’s been said that the United States won the Cold War without firing a shot — a statement, as P. J. O’Rourke once wrote, that doubtless surprised veterans of Korea and Vietnam. But it wouldn’t be entirely incorrect to call the long stare-down between the U.S. and the Soviet Union a battle of ideas. Dwight
- William Faulkner Resigns From His Post Office Job With a Spectacular Letter (1924)by OC on June 5, 2025 at 8:00 am
Working a dull civil service job ill-suited to your talents does not make you a writer, but plenty of famous writers have worked such jobs. Nathaniel Hawthorne worked at a Boston customhouse for a year. His friend Herman Melville put in considerably more time—19 years—as a customs inspector in New York, following in the footsteps of
- The 100 Greatest Paintings of All Time: From Botticelli and Bosch to Bacon and Basquiatby Colin Marshall on June 4, 2025 at 9:00 am
It would be a worthwhile exercise for any of us to sit down and attempt to draw up a list of our 100 favorite paintings of all time. Naturally, those not professionally involved with art history may have some trouble quite hitting that number. Still, however many titles we can write down, each of us
- Leonard Bernstein: The Greatest 5 Minutes in Music Educationby OC on June 4, 2025 at 8:00 am
We’ve previously written about one of Leonard Bernstein’s major works, The Unanswered Question, the staggering six-part lecture that the multi-disciplinary artist gave as part of his duties as Harvard’s Charles Eliot Norton Professor. Over 11 hours, Bernstein attempts to explain the whither and the whence of music history, notably at a time when Classical music
- How John Lennon Wrote the Beatles’ Best Song, “A Day in the Life”by Colin Marshall on June 3, 2025 at 9:00 am
If you’re under 60, you probably heard the line “I read the news today, oh boy” before encountering the song it opens. Even after you discovered the work of the Beatles, it may have taken you some time to understand what, exactly, it was that John Lennon read in the news. The “lucky man who
- Albert Einstein’s Grades: A Fascinating Look at His Report Cardsby OC on June 3, 2025 at 8:00 am
Albert Einstein was a precocious child. At the age of twelve, he followed his own line of reasoning to find a proof of the Pythagorean Theorem. At thirteen he read Kant, just for the fun of it. And before he was fifteen he had taught himself differential and integral calculus. But while the young Einstein