Writer-Director Hayao Miyazaki is renowned for the gorgeousness of his feature length animations, and storylines that combine indigenous Japanese elements with supernatural whimsy.

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.

“Sir,” says James Brown to a reporter who had just made the mistake of calling him James, “I’m going to call you by your last name as long as you call me by mine. One thing I fought for was respect, Okay? I didn’t have that all the time.

Even those of us who only took half a music appreciation course in college know about the impact of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, the orchestral ballet that nearly caused a brawl at its debut. Ah, but how times have changed in the exactly one hundred years since that May evening at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées.

There’s a certain irony to Polish animator Piotr Dumala’s innovative style, a stop-motion technique in which he scratches an image into painted plaster, then paints it over again immediately and scratches the next. Called “destructive animation,” Dumala devised the method while studying art conservation at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts.

Carlo Zapponi, a data visualization designer at Nokia, has created a pretty splendid visualization of the 1,042 meteorites that humans have witnessed hitting our planet since 861 AD. If you click the image above, you will see the visualization in full screen mode.

Great talents seem to embody their craft. It’s as if they invented the form and then broke the mold when they were finished with it.
One of the best modern examples of this virtuosity is Mel Blanc, voice of Bugs Bunny and nearly all of the Looney Tunes cartoon gang. Blanc, who voiced more than 1,000 characters, was famously hard-working.

Blank on Blank, the nonprofit group that uses the magic of animation to bring forgotten interviews back to life, has come out with a new episode featuring the Beastie Boys in their early days. “Beastie Boys on Being Stupid” (above) is built on excerpts from a 1985 interview with Rocci Fisch for ABC Radio.

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.

The United States has only five percent of the world’s population, but somewhere between 35 and 50 percent of the world’s privately owned guns. Is it a surprise, then, that we have significantly higher rates of gun violence?
According to research published by the National Institutes of Health, homicide rates in the U.S. are 6.