Image via Wikimedia Commons In 590 AD, Pope Gregory I unveiled a list of the Seven Deadly Sins – lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride – as a way to keep the flock from straying into the thorny fields of ungodliness. These days, though, for all but the most devout, Pope Gregory’s list […]

Frank Lloyd Wright is unlikely to be displaced as the archetype of the genius architect anytime soon, at least in America, but even he had to start somewhere. At nine years old, as architecture YouTuber Stewart Hicks explains in the video above, Wright received a set of blocks from his mother, who hoped that “her […]

We have featured Benedict Cumberbatch reading letters by Kurt Vonnegut, Alan Turing, Albert Camus, and Nick Cave, along with passages from Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Melville’s Moby Dick. It’s all pretty heady stuff. And now it’s time for something completely different. Above, we have Mr. Cumberbatch reading, with classic British understatement, a comical letter written by Ross Beeley, […]

Imagine how many times someone born in the eighteen-sixties could ever expect to hear music. The number would vary, of course, depending on the individual’s class and family inclinations. Suffice it to say that each chance would have been more precious than those of us in the twenty-first century can easily understand. Our ability to […]