Hear the Pieces Mozart Composed When He Was Only 5 Years Old

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A preter­nat­u­ral­ly tal­ent­ed, pre­co­cious child, bare­ly out of tod­dler­hood, in pow­dered wig and knee-breech­es, caper­ing around the great hous­es of 18th cen­tu­ry Europe between vir­tu­oso per­for­mances on the harp­si­chord. A young boy who can play any piece any­one puts in front of him, and com­pose sym­phonies extem­po­ra­ne­ous­ly with ease…. Few scenes bet­ter cap­ture the mythos…

Curious Alice — The 1971 Anti-Drug Movie Based on Alice in Wonderland That Oddly Made Drugs Look Like Fun

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The Rea­gan pres­i­den­cy was prob­a­bly the gold­en age of anti-drug mes­sag­ing. America’s school kids were told that a brain was like an egg and drugs were like a fry­ing pan. The First Lady told America’s school kids sim­ply to “Just Say No.” The mes­sage was stu­pe­fy­ing­ly sim­ple. Drugs, like Com­mu­nism and tax­es, are…

Man as Industrial Palace: Watch an Animation of the Famous 1926 Lithograph That Depicts the Human Body as a Modern Factory

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In 1926, Fritz Kahn, a Ger­man gyne­col­o­gist and anato­my text­book author, pro­duced a lith­o­graph called Der Men­sch als Indus­triepalast (Man as Indus­tri­al Palace) that depict­ed the human body as a fac­to­ry, a chem­i­cal plant of sorts. Kah­n’s body came com­plete with mechan­i­cal lungs, a rock-sort­ing stom­ach, gears for a throat, and a switch­board…

An Introduction to Aleister Crowley, History’s Most Infamous Occultist

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“Do what thou wilt”: as the cen­tral prin­ci­ple of a world­view, it may not sound like much, but at least there are always a great many peo­ple ready and will­ing to hear it. So dis­cov­ered Aleis­ter Crow­ley, the ear­ly twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry Occultist now remem­bered not just for his uncon­ven­tion­al reli­gious prac­tices, but also for his…

Isaac Asimov Predicts in 1964 What the World Will Look Like in 2014

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Image by Rochester Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

When New York City host­ed The World’s Fair in 1964, Isaac Asi­mov, the pro­lif­ic sci-fi author and pro­fes­sor of bio­chem­istry at Boston Uni­ver­si­ty, took the oppor­tu­ni­ty to won­der what the world would look like 50 years hence — assum­ing the world sur­vived the nuclear threats…