“Early cookbooks were fit for kings,” writes Henry Notaker at The Atlantic. “The oldest published recipe collections” in the 15th and 16th centuries in Western Europe “emanated from the palaces of monarchs, princes, and grand señores.” Cookbooks were more than recipe collections—they were guides to court etiquette and sumptuous records of luxurious living. In ancient […]

“May you live in interesting times,” goes the apocryphal but nevertheless much-invoked “Chinese curse.” Egon Schiele, born in the Austria-Hungary of 1890, certainly did live in interesting times, and his work, as featured in the new Great Art Explained video above, can look like the creations of a cursed man. That’s especially true of those […]

Our brains dictate our every move. They’re the ones who spur us to study hard, so we can make something of ourselves, in order to better our communities. They name our babies, choose our clothes, decide what we’re hungry for. They make and break laws, organize protests, fritter away hours on social media, and give […]

Karlheinz Stockhausen appears, among many other cultural figures, on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. His inclusion was more than a trendy gesture toward the European avant-garde; anyone who knows that pathbreaking electronic composer’s work will notice its influence on the album at first listen. Paul McCartney himself went on record with […]

The world’s most famous organ piece, played on the world’s largest fully functioning pipe organ. That’s what you have above. Here, organist Dylan David Shaw performs Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor on the famous Wanamaker organ. Originally built for the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, the organ ended up in Philadelphia’s Wanamaker’s […]