You Can Buy Historic Italian Houses for €1 — But What’s the Catch?

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From Abruz­zo to Verge­moli, small Ital­ian towns and vil­lages have recent­ly been mak­ing their his­toric homes avail­able for pur­chase for as low as €1. Giv­en the pic­turesque nature of many of these places, such offers have proven prac­ti­cal­ly irre­sistible to for­eign buy­ers who’ve made their mon­ey and are look­ing to escape the big-city rat race,…

Jimi Hendrix Unplugged: Two Great Recordings of Hendrix Playing Acoustic Guitar

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As a young gui­tar play­er, per­haps no one inspired me as much as Jimi Hen­drix, though I nev­er dreamed I’d attain even a frac­tion of his skill. But what attract­ed me to him was his near-total lack of formality—he didn’t read music, wasn’t trained in any clas­si­cal sense, played an upside-down right-hand­ed gui­tar as a…

Watch Hardware Wars, the Original Star Wars Parody, in HD (1978)

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This past May, YouTu­ber Jen­ny Nichol­son set off waves of social-media dis­course with “The Spec­tac­u­lar Fail­ure of the Star Wars Hotel,” a four-hour-long video cri­tique of Dis­ney’s huge­ly expen­sive, now-shut­tered Star Wars: Galac­tic Star­cruis­er in Orlan­do, Flori­da. Hav­ing gone viral enough to rack up over nine mil­lion views in less than two months, it’s…

Honoré de Balzac Writes About “The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee,” and His Epic Coffee Addiction

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174 years after his death, Hon­oré de Balzac remains an extreme­ly mod­ern-sound­ing wag. Were he alive today, he’d no doubt be pound­ing out his provoca­tive obser­va­tions in a cof­fice, a café whose free wifi, lenient staff, and abun­dant elec­tri­cal out­lets make it a mag­net for writ­ers.

One has a hunch…

Andy Warhol Hosts Frank Zappa on His Cable TV Show, and Later Recalls, “I Hated Him More Than Ever” After the Show

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Had Andy Warhol lived to see the internet–especially social networking–he would have loved it, though it may not have loved him. Though Warhol did see the very begin­nings of the PC rev­o­lu­tion, and made com­put­er art near the end of his life on a Com­modore Ami­ga 1000, he was most­ly enam­ored, unsur­pris­ing­ly, of…