Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam.… Claims to ancient origin and ultimate authority notwithstanding, the world’s five major religions are all of recent vintage compared to the couple hundred thousand years or more of human existence on the planet. During most of our prehistory, religious beliefs and practices were largely localized, confined to the territorial or […]

At first, film simply recorded events: a man walking across a garden, workers leaving a factory, a train pulling into a station. The medium soon matured enough to accommodate drama, which for early filmmakers meant simply shooting what amounted to stage productions from the perspective of a viewer in the audience. At that stage, we […]

It can’t have been easy being Franz Kafka. But then, it can’t have been much easier being Franz Kafka’s fiancée, as evidenced by the correspondence read aloud by Richard Ayoade in the new Letters Live video above. “It is now 10:30 on Monday morning,” he wrote to Felice Bauer on November 4, 1912. “I have […]

One especially appealing aspect of philosophy, as a field of study, is that you don’t have to go anywhere to learn it but the library. And these days, you don’t necessarily have to go there, now that so many philosophical texts have become freely available on the internet. In the video above, philosophy YouTuber Jared […]

The story of the Globe Theatre, the ancestral home of Shakespeare’s plays, is itself very Shakespearean, in all of the ways we use that adjective: it has deep roots in English history, a tragic backstory, and represents all of the hodgepodge of London, in the early 17th century and today, with the city’s colorful street […]