by OC What you’re watching above isn’t your ordinary film. No, this film — A Boy and His Atom – holds the Guinness World Record for being the World’s Smallest Stop-Motion Film. It’s literally a movie made with atoms, created by IBM nanophysicists who have “used a scanning tunneling microscope to move thousands of carbon monoxide molecules,
by Colin Marshall It would hardly be notable to make the acquaintance of a Greek Buddhist today. Despite having originated in Asia, that religion — or philosophy, or way of life, or whatever you prefer to call it — now has adherents all over the world. Modern-day Buddhists need not make an arduous journey in
by OC Writing in his 1995 diary about his seminal ambient album Music for Airports, Eno remembered his initial thoughts going into it: “I want to make a kind of music that prepares you for dying–that doesn’t get all bright and cheerful and pretend you’re not a little apprehensive, but which makes you say to
by Colin Marshall Apart from the likes of bravo and pizza, graffiti must be one of the first Italian words that English-speakers learn in everyday life. As for why the English word comes directly from the Italian, perhaps it has something to do with the history of writing on the walls — a history that, in
by Colin Marshall Hieronymus Bosch’s masterpiece of grotesquerie, The Garden of Earthly Delights, contains a young God, Adam and Eve, oversized fruits and musical instruments, owls, tortured sinners, something called a “tree man” whose body contains an entire tavern, a defecating avian devil eating a human being, and “frolicking, oblivious figures engaged in all sorts
by OC From WIRED comes this: NYU professor and “authoritarianism scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat joins WIRED to answer the internet’s burning questions about dictators and fascism. Why do people support dictators? How do dictators come to power? What’s the difference between a dictatorship, an autocracy, and authoritarianism? What are the most common personality traits found in
by Colin Marshall The early trailer for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho above describes the film as “the picture you MUST see from the beginning… or not at all!” That’s good advice, given how early in the film its first big twist arrives. But it was also a policy: “Every theatre manager, everywhere, has been instructed to
Hear a second or two of Vernon Burch’s “Get Up,” and you’re back in 1990; of “Balance and Rehearsal” from the JBL sound-test album Session, and you’re back in 1999; of Eddie Johns’ “More Spell on You,” and you’re back in 2001. What, you don’t know any of those songs? Perhaps you’re more
We’ve all heard of the great American road trip. If you’ve ever dreamt of taking a great Italian road trip, you’ve surely come across this inevitable hitch in the plan: you can’t drive to Sicily. You can, of course, put your car on a ferry; you can even take a train that gets
Of all the cinematic trailblazers to emerge during the early years of the Soviet Union – Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Lev Kuleshov – Dziga Vertov (né Denis Arkadievitch Kaufman, 1896–1954) was the most radical. Whereas Eisenstein – as seen in that film school standard Battleship Potemkin – used montage editing to create new ways
