OC    When Roger Waters left Pink Floyd after ’s The Final Cut, the remaining members had good reason to assume the band was truly, as Waters proclaimed, a spent force. After releasing solo projects in the next few years, David Gilmour, Nick Mason, and Richard Wright soon discovered they would...

Colin Marshall    Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick are two of the first directors whose names young cinephiles get to know. They’re also names between which quite a few of those young cinephiles draw a battle line: you may have enjoyed films by both of these auteurs, but ultimately, you’re going to have to side...

OC    Flannery O’Connor was a Southern writer who, as Joyce Carol Oates once said, had less in common with Faulkner than with Kafka and Kierkegaard. Isolated by poor health and consumed by her fervent Catholic faith, O’Connor created works of moral fiction that, according to Oates, were not refined New...

Colin Marshall    At the moment, you can’t see the largest, most detailed handmade model of Imperial Rome for yourself. That’s because the Museo della Civiltà Romana, the institution that houses it, has been closed for renovations since . But you can get a guided tour of Il Plastico, as this grand Rome in...

OC    Claude Monet, : We’ve all seen their works in fixed form, enshrined in museums and printed in books. But there’s something special about watching a great artist at work. Over the years, we’ve posted film clips of some of the greatest artists of the th century caught in the act of creation....

Colin Marshall    Judging by how certain American cities smell these days, you’d think cannabis was invented last week. But that spike in enthusiasm, as well as in public indulgence, comes as only a recent chapter in that substance’s very long history. In fact, says the presenter of the PBS Eons video above,...

OC    A week ago, Big Think released this video featuring philosopher Daniel Dennett talking about the four biggest ideas in philosophy. Today, we learned that he passed away at age . The New York Times obituary for Dennett reads: Espousing his ideas in best sellers, he insisted that religion was an...

Colin Marshall    We now live, as one often hears, in an age of few musical superstars, but towering ones. The popular culture of the twenty twenties can, at times, seem to be contained entirely within the person of Taylor Swift at least when the media magnet that is Beyoncé takes a breather. But look past them,...

OC    I feel like every single frame of the film is burned into my retina, said Oscar winning actress Cate Blanchett about the movie Stalker . I hadn’t seen anything like it before and I haven’t really seen anything like it since. Andrei Tarkovsky’s final film in the USSR seems like an unlikely...

Colin Marshall    Image via Pompeii Archaeological Park Imagine visiting the home of a prominent, wealthy figure, and at the evening’s end finding yourself in a room dedicated to late night entertaining, painted entirely black except for a few scenes from antiquity. Perhaps this wouldn’t sound entirely implausible...

OC    Last fall, OpenAI started letting users create custom versions of ChatGPT ones that would let people create AI assistants to complete tasks in their personal or professional lives. In the months that followed, some users created AI apps that could generate recipes and meals. Others developed GPTs...

Colin Marshall    If you want to appreciate Japanese books, it helps to be able to read Japanese books. It helps, but it’s not percent necessary: even if you’ve never learned a single kanji character, you’ve probably marveled at one time or another at the aesthetics of Japan’s print culture. Maybe you’ve even...

OC    For Christopher Schwarz, American anarchism isn’t about bombs and leather jackets; it’s about being an independent designer. It’s about working outside massive and dehumanizing institutions like corporations and designing beautiful objects that last. He writes: As a designer of books,...

Colin Marshall    More than thirty years after the formal dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, few around the world have a clear understanding of how life actually worked there. That holds less for the larger political and economic questions than it does for the routine mechanics of day to day...

OC    FYI. Google and MIT RAISE have partnered to create a free course for teachers and educators, one designed to show teachers how they can use generative AI tools to save time on everyday tasks, personaliz e instruction to meet student needs, and enhanc e lessons and activities in creative ways. ...