The Roman Colosseum Deconstructed: 3D Animation Reveals the Hidden Technology That Powered Rome’s Great Arena

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Most tourists in Rome put the Colos­se­um at the top of their to-see list. (My own sis­ter-in-law, soon to head out on her Ital­ian hon­ey­moon, plans to head to that sto­ried ruin more or less straight from the air­port.) Even those with no par­tic­u­lar inter­est in ancient Roman civ­i­liza­tion, step­ping into the space that was…

The 1924 Soviet Chess Match Where The Chess Pieces Were Real Soldiers and Horses

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Let’s time trav­el back to Leningrad (aka St. Peters­burg) in 1924. That’s when an uncon­ven­tion­al chess match was played by Peter Romanovsky and Ilya Rabi­novich, two chess mas­ters of the day.

Appar­ent­ly, they called in their moves over the tele­phone. And then real-life chess pieces—in the form of human beings and horses—were…

How Zaha Hadid Revolutionized Architecture & Drew Inspiration from Russian Avant-Garde Art

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Zaha Hadid died in 2016, at the age of 65. She cer­tain­ly was­n’t old, by the stan­dards of our time, though in most pro­fes­sions, her best work­ing years would already have been behind her. She was, how­ev­er, an archi­tect, and by age 65, most archi­tects are still very much in their prime. Take

Education for Death: The Making of the Nazi–Walt Disney’s 1943 Film Shows How Fascists Are Made

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Dur­ing World War II, Walt Dis­ney entered into a con­tract with the US gov­ern­ment to devel­op 32 ani­mat­ed shorts. Near­ly bank­rupt­ed by Fan­ta­sia (1940), Dis­ney need­ed to refill its cof­fers, and mak­ing Amer­i­can pro­pa­gan­da films did­n’t seem like a bad way to do it. On numer­ous occa­sions, Don­ald Duck was called upon to deliv­er moral…

The Extreme Life and Philosophy of Hunter S. Thompson: Gonzo Journalism and the American Condition

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Hunter S. Thomp­son has been gone for two decades now. When he went out, as the new Pur­suit of Won­der video on his life and work reminds us, he did so in a high­ly Amer­i­can man­ner: with a gun, and at the moment of his own choos­ing. Even his long­time fans who respect­ed…