In the 1950s, Mick Jagger (then still called “Mike Jagger”) was a middle class kid growing up in Dartford, Kent, England. His mother, Eva, was a hairdresser; his father, Joe, a PE teacher. Together, they lived in a nice, orderly home, with more than enough money to pay the bills.

Over a career going strong since the seventies, Samuel L. Jackson has shown us time and again that he can deliver a monologue — a boon to the craft of screen acting, where brief but powerful speeches seemed to have fallen out of fashion just before Jackson’s rise to fame in the nineties.

Yesterday we featured Alain de Botton’s television broadcast on the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Today, we feature another, earlier television broadcast on a much more recently active philosopher: Mike Wallace’s 1959 interview of Ayn Rand, writer and founder of the school of thought known as Objectivism.

On the list of the most interviewable auteurs in film history, Alfred Hitchcock must rank particularly high. I wouldn’t necessarily want to find myself on the business end of that sardonically stern gaze myself, but when Hitchcock agreed to sit down and talk, he really sat down and talked.

If anyone should ask you how to promote a celebrity fragrance without losing face, click play and whisper, “Like This.”
It helps if the celeb in question is generally acknowledged to be a class act. Imagine a drunken starlet emerging from her limo sans-drawers to stumble through her favorite poem by a 13th century Sufi mystic.

“It’s not hard to brew a great cup of coffee,” writes Kelefa Sanneh in a recent New Yorker post on the Melbourne International Coffee Expo. “At least, it shouldn’t be.

In September 1975, Brian Eno released his album Another Green World. The following month, the BBC’s acclaimed documentary series Arena first aired, using Another Green World‘s title track as its theme music. 35 years later, the show finally got around to documenting Eno himself.

Here’s a sad little piece of rock and roll history: the last television interview of Keith Moon, mercurial drummer for The Who. It was broadcast live on the morning of August 7, 1978, exactly one month before Moon’s death from a drug overdose at the age of 32.

Everyone on the internet knows the bitter disappointment of clicking on lists that sound more interesting than they turn out to be, just as enthusiasts of American history have grown weary of hearing claims about what has or hasn’t “changed America.

In the final months of his short life, Bruce Lee wrote a personal essay, “In My Own Process” where he said, “Basically, I have always been a martial artist by choice and actor by profession. But, above all, I am hoping to actualize myself to be an artist of life along the way.