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While our country looks like it might be coming apart at the seams, it’s good to revisit, every once in a while, moments when it did work. And that’s not so that we can feel nostalgic about a lost time, but so that we can remind ourselves how, given the right conditions, things could work […]
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” So holds the third and most famous of the “three laws” originally articulated by science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke. Even when it was first published in the late nineteen-sixties, Clarke’s third law would have felt true to any resident of the developed world, surrounded by and […]
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_kuFyuH6tvOjqf-ugVZ1RXulJtFUqnDPz0Video can’t be loaded because JavaScript is disabled: Satie: Discoveries (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_kuFyuH6tvOjqf-ugVZ1RXulJtFUqnDPz0) If asked to name our favorite French composer of the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, most of us would reach straight for Erik Satie, being able to bring to mind only his most famous pieces, the Gymnopédies and perhaps the Gnossiennes. We may […]
Several years ago, we brought you a transcription and a couple of audio interpretations of the oldest known song in the world, discovered in the ancient Syrian city of Ugarit and dating back to the 14th century B.C.E.. Likely performed on an instrument resembling an ancient lyre, the so-called “Hurrian Cult Song” or “Hurrian Hymn […]
Given the dominance YouTube has achieved over large swathes of world culture, we’d all expect to remember the first video we watched there. Yet many or most of us don’t: rather, we simply realized, one day in the mid-to-late two-thousands, that we’d developed a daily YouTube habit. Like as not, your own introduction to the […]
More in history
“The comity of European peoples went to pieces when, and because, it allowed its weakest member to be excluded and persecuted.” – Hannah Arendt, We Refugees, 1943 Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906–December 4, 1975) was a German Jew who escaped the Holocaust, became an American citizen and saw some of the leading Nazis … Continue reading "Hannah Arendt on Jews, Refugees And Suicide, 1943" The post Hannah Arendt on Jews, Refugees And Suicide, 1943 appeared first on Flashbak.
In his seminal book of art theory entitled On Painting, Leon Battista Alberti staked a claim for painting as a liberal art for the first time. Split into three sections dealing with geometry, art theory and method, and the ethical constitution of great painters, this brief treatise straddles several disciplines and marks a departure […]
Plato’s Last Word to Dionysius JamesHoare Tue, 07/01/2025 - 08:00
In ancient Greek mythology, Helios was the embodiment of the sun and drove across the sky every day in his golden chariot, creating the day-night cycle. As the god of the sun, Helios was also associated with light, life, and truth. From his place high in the sky, he was said to see and […]
