If you wanted to hear the voice of your favorite writer in the nineteen-sixties — a time before audiobooks, let alone podcasts — you consulted the catalog of Caedmon Records. That label specialized in LPs of literary eminences reading their own work. This may or may not be the kind of company in which you’d […]

It’s common to hear it said that some particular city — usually one of the American metropolises that sprang into existence over the past couple of centuries — “shouldn’t exist.” And indeed, as urban planner M. Nolan Gray writes in a recent blog post, “no city should exist.” On the scale of human history, we’ve […]

In 1939, Igor Stravinsky emigrated to the United States, first arriving in New York City, before settling in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he delivered the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard during the 1939–40 academic year. While living in Boston, the composer conducted the Boston Symphony and, on one famous occasion, he decided to conduct his […]

More than a few visitors to Florence make a beeline to the Galleria dell’Accademia, and once inside, to Michelangelo’s David, the most famous sculpture in the world. But how many of them, one wonders, then take the time to view the three other Davids in that city alone? At the Bargello, just ten minutes’ walk […]

Image via Wikimedia Commons A number of years ago, a Reddit user posed the question to Neil deGrasse Tyson: “Which books should be read by every single intelligent person on the planet?” Below, you will find the book list offered up by the astrophysicist, director of the Hayden Planetarium, and popularizer of science. Where possible, we […]