Last Wednesday night, New York Institution Patti Smith appeared at downtown venue Bowery Ballroom with a few friends to read poetry and play some music.

Critical theorist and musicologist Theodor Adorno was a contrarian, almost contradictory figure—a committed Marxist thinker who was also a cultural elitist. Anyone who’s sat through a theory class will know his name (most likely through his seminal text Dialectic of Enlightenment, written with Max Horkheimer).

Buzz Aldrin is maybe the coolest ex-astronaut alive, with the possible exception of Story Musgrave. Both of these guys are forging ahead with life at the age when lesser humans pack it in.

Grizzled granddad of rock Neil Young has railed against so-called “lossy” digital formats—our current standard of consumer audio—for at least a couple of years now, promising to replace Mp3s with his own high-end digital service and player.

UK’s Open University has developed a fun way to market their design courses: a series of six short animations called “Design in a Nutshell” that briefly survey important movements in the arts and architecture—from the late-nineteenth century Gothic Revival to late-twentieth century Postmodermism.

In a famous scene from Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, the biographer and his subject come to discuss the bizarre theories of Bishop Berkeley, who posited that everything is immaterial—nothing has any real existence; it’s all just ideal concepts held together by the mind of God.

Long before Oscar Wilde became a literary celebrity for his most famous work—The Picture of Dorian Gray and plays like Salome and The Importance of Being Earnest—he was a bit of a reality star.

In some popular imaginings, F. Scott Fitzgerald becomes so associated with the jazz age frivolity he keenly observed, and the social climbing of his best-known character, that much of his pre- and post-Gatsby writing gets occluded.

I’m riding a mighty big bandwagon when I tell you that Exile on Main Street is my favorite Stones record. It’s like championing the virtues of Sgt. Pepper’s or Dark Side of the Moon. Really, those are great albums? Wow, who knew.

On March 5, 1933, Germany held its last democratic elections until the end of WWII, and the National Socialists gained a plurality in the Reichstag, with 43.9% of the vote and 288 seats. This event paved the way for the Enabling Act later that month, which effectively empowered Hitler as dictator.