Full Width [alt+shift+f] Shortcuts [alt+shift+k]
Sign Up [alt+shift+s] Log In [alt+shift+l]
39
A wide-ranging collection of links on ballet, ugly architecture, Soviet Control rooms, Hokusai, and nifty CSS tools.
a year ago

Improve your reading experience

Logged in users get linked directly to articles resulting in a better reading experience. Please login for free, it takes less than 1 minute.

More from On the Arts

Generative AI and the Falling Costs of Art Creation

For individual creators on a budget, the future is bright.

a year ago 87 votes
On the Arts: A Year-End Review

A brief guide to everything published this year.

a year ago 50 votes
Winter as Reading Season

David Foster Wallace on the necessity of quiet time in order to read.

a year ago 43 votes
The Meaning of Melancholy

An Interview with Hans Maes

a year ago 45 votes
How to Write a Proper Haiku

A Starter's Guide to the Deceptively Simple Poetic Form

a year ago 43 votes

More in creative

Sunk costs and the framework for forward motion

Everything that happened yesterday, and the yesterdays before that, is real. It happened. Perhaps it’s the hard work you did to earn a degree, or a significant error that cost you and others a great deal. Maybe it’s a community you chose to join, or one that you failed to embrace. All of these costs […]

20 hours ago 3 votes
The Entire History of English in 22 Minutes

When we speak English, we might say we’re speaking the language of Samuel Johnson, the man who wrote its first dictionary. Or we could say we’re speaking the language of Shakespeare, who coined more English terms than any other individual in history. It would make just as much sense to describe ourselves as speaking the […]

21 hours ago 3 votes
The Superman metaphors

Sooner or later, we are all superheroes. Superman wears a costume. As we all do. He isn’t great at time management, always focused on the urgency at hand instead of investing in long-term planning. He rarely works to change the foundational system he’s part of. Supervillians exist in opposition to him and his work. Without […]

2 days ago 5 votes
How the Ancient Greeks Built Their Magnificent Temples: The Art of Ancient Engineering

Doric, Ionic, Corinthian: these, as practically everyone who went through school in the West somehow remembers, are the three varieties of classical column. We may still recall them, more specifically, as representing the three ancient Greek architectural styles. But as ancient-history YouTuber Garrett Ryan points out in the new Told in Stone video above, only […]

2 days ago 3 votes
The four arcs

They can carry us away, amplify our work or slowly change everything around us. These arcs can easily become invisible forces, pushing us to make choices and to ignore their origins or consequences. Capitalism is the most common one, along with its shadow, industrialism. We show up on behalf of the invisible hand, engaging with […]

3 days ago 5 votes