How the Hugely Acclaimed Shōgun TV Series Makes Translation Interesting

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Many of us grew up see­ing hard­back copies of Shō­gun on var­i­ous domes­tic book­shelves. Whether their own­ers ever actu­al­ly got through James Clavel­l’s famous­ly hefty nov­el of sev­en­teenth-cen­tu­ry Japan is open to ques­tion, but they may well have seen the first tele­vi­sion adap­ta­tion, which aired on NBC in 1980. Star­ring Richard Cham­ber­lain and Toshi­ro…

Moebius Gives 18 Wisdom-Filled Tips to Aspiring Artists

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Jean Giraud, aka Moe­bius, was a com­ic book artist who com­bined blind­ing speed with bound­less imag­i­na­tion. He shaped the look of Alien, Empire Strikes Back and The Fifth Ele­ment. He reimag­ined the Sil­ver Surfer for Stan Lee. And he is an acknowl­edged influ­ence on every­one from Japan­ese ani­mat­ing great Hayao Miyaza­ki…

The Real Reason Why Music Is Getting Worse: Rick Beato Explains

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Ear­li­er this month, a North Car­oli­na man was charged with gen­er­at­ing songs using an arti­fi­cial-intel­li­gence sys­tem and con­fig­ur­ing bots to stream them auto­mat­i­cal­ly, thus rack­ing up some $10 mil­lion in ille­gal roy­al­ties. Though that amount no doubt star­tles many of us, in this age when legit­i­mate musi­cians pub­licly lament the pit­tance they earn through…

David Bowie Songs Reimagined as Pulp Fiction Book Covers: Space Oddity, Heroes, Life on Mars & More

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In the last year, screen­writer Todd Alcott’s hob­by has blown up into a legit side career.

This Etsy sell­er isn’t ped­dling kom­bucha SCOBYs, let­ter press­ing new baby announce­ments, or repur­pos­ing old barns for use as cut­ting boards.

No, Alcott’s crafty for­tunes fall square­ly at the inter­sec­tion of pulp…

How a 16th-Century Explorer’s Sailing Ship Worked: An Animated Video Takes You on a Comprehensive Tour

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These days, it feels as if you can’t go very long at all before scrolling past anoth­er announce­ment about some new tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ment (real­ized or sched­uled) relat­ed to space explo­ration. Some react to this by won­der­ing what could pos­si­bly be out there in the uni­verse to jus­ti­fy such enor­mous­ly cap­i­tal- and research-inten­sive projects. Cen­turies ago,…