Take a Virtual Tour of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London

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The sto­ry of the Globe The­atre, the ances­tral home of Shakespeare’s plays, is itself very Shake­speare­an, in all of the ways we use that adjec­tive: it has deep roots in Eng­lish his­to­ry, a trag­ic back­sto­ry, and rep­re­sents all of the hodge­podge of Lon­don, in the ear­ly 17th cen­tu­ry and today, with the city’s…

The Origins of Satan: The Evolution of the Devil in Religion

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The Dev­il, the Beast, Beelze­bub, Lucifer, Satan: whichev­er name we hap­pen to call him, we know full well who the guy is — or at least, we think we do. In fact, the images and evo­ca­tions of that embod­i­ment of (or per­haps metaphor for) sin, deceit, and temp­ta­tion that many of us have encoun­tered in…

Gustave Doré’s Haunting Illustrations of Dante’s Divine Comedy

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Infer­no, Can­to X:

Many artists have attempt­ed to illus­trate Dante Alighier­i’s epic poem the Divine Com­e­dy, but none have made such an indeli­ble stamp on our col­lec­tive imag­i­na­tion as the French­man Gus­tave Doré.

Doré was 23 years old in 1855, when he first decid­ed to cre­ate a series of…

Did Paul McCartney Really Die in 1966? How the Biggest Beatles Conspiracy Theory Spread

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No pop music can have inspired more scruti­ny than that of the Bea­t­les. Of course, intense and sus­tained atten­tion has been paid to every aspect of the band’s exis­tence — and, in the case of Paul McCart­ney, his pur­port­ed non-exis­tence as well. The the­o­ry that he actu­al­ly died in the nine­teen-six­ties and was there­after secret­ly…

The Ancient Roman Dodecahedron: The Mysterious Object That Has Baffled Archaeologists for Centuries

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There isn’t much place for dodec­a­he­dra in mod­ern life, at least in those mod­ern lives with  table­top role-play­ing. In the ancient Roman Empire, how­ev­er, those shapes seem to have been prac­ti­cal­ly house­hold objects — not that we know what the house­hold would have done with them. Thus far, well over 100 sim­i­lar­ly designed cop­per-alloy…