The printing press was invented in the middle of the fifteenth century, and it's been downhill for the written word ever since. Even before then, arguments that the volume of writing being done far ou...

Before she became a composer of electronic music, Else Marie Pade was a sick child listening to the radio. Frequent kidney inflammations consigned her to bed for long periods of time, which would cons...

Jazz has inspired a great many things, and a great many things have inspired jazz, and more than a few of the music's masters have found their aspiration by looking — or listening — to the divine.

Many of us have put off a visit to Venice for fear of the hordes of tourists who roam its streets and boat down its canals day in and day out. To judge by the most visible of its economic activity, th...

It's common to feel like we know our artists, writers, musicians, actors… we want so badly to touch their lives in some way, as their lives touch ours.

The idea of a youngster vacillating between whether to become a magician or join the Central Intelligence Agency may sound implausible, but those two working environments have deeper commonalities tha...

Image via Buckminster Fuller Estate The novels of John Brunner have become a niche taste, even within his genre of science fiction. A more sociologically minded version of Philip K.

When work on the Sagrada Família first began in 1882, the original architect could hardly have imagined that, 144 years later, the ambitious undertaking would still be underway. Yet here we are.

If a painter is ahead of his time, his work won't sell particularly well while he's alive. If an architect is ahead of his time, his work probably won't exist at all — not in built form, at least.

The history of the printed word is full of bibliographic twists and turns, major historical moments, and the significant printing of books now so obscure no one has read them since their publication.

When work on the Sagrada Família first began in 1882, the original architect could hardly have imagined that, 144 years later, the ambitious undertaking would still be underway. Yet here we are.

Image via Buckminster Fuller Estate The novels of John Brunner have become a niche taste, even within his genre of science fiction. A more sociologically minded version of Philip K.

It's common to feel like we know our artists, writers, musicians, actors… we want so badly to touch their lives in some way, as their lives touch ours.

The history of the printed word is full of bibliographic twists and turns, major historical moments, and the significant printing of books now so obscure no one has read them since their publication.

The word wireless is going the way of computerized and portable, and for much the same reasons. We no longer regard wireless devices that require no physical connections to anything else as marvels, b...

People have spoken for decades, and with great certainty, of the impending death of print. But even here into the 21st century, presses continue to run around the world, putting out books and periodic...

Whether schools kill creativity, the mechanics of procrastination, what happens when you reply to spam e-mail: these are just a few of the subjects that most aggressively captivated the minds of the s...

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 14...

In the fall of 1969 the Rolling Stones were in a Los Angeles recording studio, putting the final touches on their album Let It Bleed. It was a tumultuous time for the Stones.

The idea of a youngster vacillating between whether to become a magician or join the Central Intelligence Agency may sound implausible, but those two working environments have deeper commonalities tha...

Carl Sagan may have passed away almost twenty years ago, but he continues to influence minds of all generations through intellectual heirs like Neil DeGrasse Tyson (host of the remake of Sagan's belov...

The idea of a youngster vacillating between whether to become a magician or join the Central Intelligence Agency may sound implausible, but those two working environments have deeper commonalities tha...

I’ve always admired people who can successfully navigate what I refer to as “Kafka’s Castle,” a term of dread for the many government and corporate agencies that have an inordinate amount of power ove...

Before she became a composer of electronic music, Else Marie Pade was a sick child listening to the radio. Frequent kidney inflammations consigned her to bed for long periods of time, which would cons...

During the 1950s, a researcher gave an artist two 50-microgram doses of LSD (each dose separated by about an hour), and then the artist was encouraged to draw pictures of the doctor who administered t...

Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I mentally revisit the various homes of my childhood, wandering from room to room, turning on lights and peering in closets until I conk out. Turns out these imaginary ...

Before she became a composer of electronic music, Else Marie Pade was a sick child listening to the radio. Frequent kidney inflammations consigned her to bed for long periods of time, which would cons...

Image by Library of Congress/Carl Van Vechten, via Wikimedia Commons Many a foreigner has visited England and found it an unexpectedly surreal place. Some of that effect has to do with encountering f...

Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I mentally revisit the various homes of my childhood, wandering from room to room, turning on lights and peering in closets until I conk out. Turns out these imaginary ...

Critical theorists like Theodor Adorno may have overreached in claiming that all mass culture is mediocre, mechanized propaganda made to justify the status quo. But that doesn’t mean they were entirel...

When we watch a movie from, say, twenty years ago, it strikes us that both nothing and everything has changed. Apart from their slightly baggier clothes, the people look the same as us. But where are ...

Everywhere you look, you can find traces of the ancient Roman civilization from which the modern West descends. That's especially true if you happen to be looking in Europe, though echoes of Latin mak...

At the center of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is a device quite like the real ancient Greek artifact known as the Antikythera mechanism, which has been called the world's oldest computer.

In 1924, Zenon Komissarenko, Youry Merkulov and Nikolai Khodataev produced Interplanetary Revolution, which might just be one of the strangest Soviet propaganda films ever produced.

Critical theorists like Theodor Adorno may have overreached in claiming that all mass culture is mediocre, mechanized propaganda made to justify the status quo. But that doesn’t mean they were entirel...

There was a time when you could just go out and buy an Enigma machine.

We venerate Galileo Galilei for daring to speak the scientific truth in the face of severe institutional opposition. He publicly acknowledged that the Earth revolves around the Sun in a time when the ...

Georges Méliès directed, produced, edited, and starred in over 500 films between 1896 and 1913, most of them brimming with special effects the filmmaker himself invented. Before Méliès, such things as...

Before he became a novelist, Haruki Murakami ran a jazz bar in Tokyo, and music has filled his novels ever since. For your listening pleasure, NTS Radio has created two playlists of the jazz and class...

We venerate Galileo Galilei for daring to speak the scientific truth in the face of severe institutional opposition. He publicly acknowledged that the Earth revolves around the Sun in a time when the ...

For decades following World War II,  the world was left wondering how the atrocities of the Holocaust could have been perpetrated in the midst of—and, most horrifically, by—a modern and civilized soci...

Georges Méliès directed, produced, edited, and starred in over 500 films between 1896 and 1913, most of them brimming with special effects the filmmaker himself invented. Before Méliès, such things as...

In 1991, the French husband-and-wife volcanologist-filmmaker team Maurice and Katia Krafft were killed by the flow of ash from the eruption of Mount Unzen in Nagasaki. Inexplicably, Werner Herzog didn...

The Gutenberg Bible went to press in the year 1454. We now see it as the first piece of mass media, printed as it was with the then-cutting-edge technology of metal movable type. But in the history of...

You don't have to spend a long time reading up on the Silk Road before you see the term itself ('Silk Road') called a misnomer.

Reading is unnatural. This will hardly come as a surprise to any child trying to put off his homework for just one more hour of watching other kids play Minecraft.

One often-repeated anecdote about Milton Friedman has the famous economist visiting a canal under construction in nineteen-sixties China.

With the Bayeux Tapestry now on display at the British Museum, Deep Down History presents a deep dive into the embroidery's full story:

Reading is unnatural. This will hardly come as a surprise to any child trying to put off his homework for just one more hour of watching other kids play Minecraft.