Franz Kafka’s Anxious Letters to His Fiancée, Read Aloud by Richard Ayoade

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It can’t have been easy being Franz Kaf­ka. But then, it can’t have been much eas­i­er being Franz Kafka’s fiancée, as evi­denced by the cor­re­spon­dence read aloud by Richard Ayoade in the new Let­ters Live video above. “It is now 10:30 on Mon­day morn­ing,” he wrote to Felice Bauer on Novem­ber 4,…

Seven Philosophy Books for Beginners: Where to Start

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One espe­cial­ly appeal­ing aspect of phi­los­o­phy, as a field of study, is that you don’t have to go any­where to learn it but the library. And these days, you don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly have to go there, now that so many philo­soph­i­cal texts have become freely avail­able on the inter­net. In the video above, phi­los­o­phy YouTu­ber…

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…