Great swathes of rock music since the nineteen-sixties would never have existed, we’re sometimes told, were it not for the recordings of Robert Johnson. Certainly the likes of Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, Robert Plant, and Bob Dylan have never hesitated to acknowledge his influence. “From the first note the vibrations from the loudspeaker made my […]

We live, as we’re often told, in the era of globalization. In fact, we’ve been told it so often over the past few decades that it now hardly seems like an observation worth making. But however thoroughly our era is defined by connections between far-flung nations, societies, economies, and cultures, we shouldn’t flatter ourselves into […]

Americans of a certain age may well remember growing up with an Apple II in the classroom, and the perpetual temptation it held out to play The Oregon Trail, Number Munchers, or perhaps Lode Runner. More than a few recess gamers went on to computer-oriented careers, but only the most curious sought an answer to the question […]

In the world of cryptography, substitution ciphers are child’s play. Indeed, we may remember literally playing with them as children, writing secret messages to our friends by replacing all the letters with numbers, say, or shifting them one or two places over in alphabetical order. Cracking such codes was a trivial matter even before the […]

We’ve lived but a few years so far into the age when artificial intelligence can produce convincing stories, songs, essays, poems, novels, and even films. For many of us, these recently implemented functions have already come to feel necessary in our daily life, but it may surprise us to consider how many people had long […]

When we think of modern architecture, we often think first of what’s called the International Style, whose minimalist, rectilinear, decoration-free forms were championed by the likes of Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier. Though they did build projects all over the world, that isn’t exactly the reason for the name. In […]

The Chinese filmmaker Wang Bing’s ‘Til Madness Do Us Part, a documentary about a mental institution in Yunnan, runs three hours and 48 minutes. Beauty Lives in Freedom, on the life of imprisoned artist Gao Ertai, is five and a half hours long; Dead Souls, on the survivors of a hard-labor camp in the Gobi Desert, […]

Though you may not hear it every day, chimera remains an evocative word, perhaps even more so for its rarity. It descends from the Greek Khimaira, literally “year-old she-goat,” the name of a mythical fire-breathing creature with a caprine body, sure enough, but also the head of a lion and the tail of a dragon. Today […]