Arts News

Upon hearing the name of Salvador Dalí, even a total layman in the art world is bound to get visions of melting clocks. Surprisingly, for an artist who showed so much self-marketing savvy, Dalí never brought an actual timepiece in that distinctively, even canonically surreal shape to market. But that hardly stopped Cartier from putting

It will no doubt come as a relief to many readers that Santa Claus appears to have been a Union supporter. We know this because he appears distributing gifts to soldiers from that side of the Mason-Dixon in one of his earliest depictions. That illustration, “Santa Claus in Camp” (above), first appeared in the Harper’s Weekly

One can hardly consider the Christmas season for long, at least in the English-speaking world, without the work of Charles Dickens coming to mind. That owes for the most part, of course, to A Christmas Carol, the novella that revived the public culture of a holiday that had been falling into desuetude by the mid-nineteenth

Die Hard is a Christmas movie. That once-contrarian categorization has increasingly been accepted over the past couple of decades, at least since an editor with whom I’ve often worked first declared it in a Slate roundup. As a result, John McTiernan’s sturdy piece of one-building eighties Hollywood action may have displaced It’s a Wonderful Life as a

When discussing a musician like Fela Kuti, many of our usual terms fail us. They fail us, that is, if we came of age in a musical culture in which artists and bands put out an album of ten or so lyrics-forward songs every two or three years, promoting it on tour while also playing

However celebrated by historians, scrutinized by archaeologists, and descended-upon by tourists it may be, Pompeii is not exceptional — not even in the fate of having been buried in ash by Mount Vesuvius in the year 76, which also happened to the nearby town of Herculaneum. Rather, it is the sheer ordinariness of that medium-sized

Who doesn’t treasure a handmade present? As the years go by, we may begin to offload the ill-fitting sweaters, the never lit sand cast candles, and the Styrofoam ball snowmen. But a present made of words takes up very little space, and it has the Ghost of Christmas Past’s power to instantly evoke the sender as they

It was something of a Christmas ritual at Hunter S. Thompson’s Colorado cabin, Owl Farm. Every year, his secretary Deborah Fuller would take down the Christmas tree and leave it on the front porch rather than dispose of it entirely. That’s because Hunter, more often than not, wanted to set it on fire. In 1990,

In the video above, UsefulCharts creator Matt Baker suggests that we not refer to the period spanning the fifth and the late fifteenth centuries as the “dark ages.” In justification, he doesn’t put forth the argument, now fairly common, that the time in question was actually full of subtle innovation occluded by modern prejudice. The

A century ago, the great French composer Claude Debussy sat down at a contraption called a Welte-Mignon reproducing piano and recorded a series of performances for posterity. The machine was designed to encode the nuances of a pianist’s playing, including pedaling and dynamics, onto piano rolls for later reproduction. Debussy recorded 14 pieces onto six rolls in