Animated Map Shows How the Five Major Religions Spread Across the World (3000 BC — 2000 AD)

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Hin­duism, Judaism, Bud­dhism, Chris­tian­i­ty, Islam.… Claims to ancient ori­gin and ulti­mate author­i­ty notwith­stand­ing, the world’s five major reli­gions are all of recent vin­tage com­pared to the cou­ple hun­dred thou­sand years or more of human exis­tence on the plan­et. Dur­ing most of our pre­his­to­ry, reli­gious beliefs and prac­tices were large­ly local­ized, con­fined to the ter­ri­to­r­i­al or…

Watch Momijigari, Japan’s Oldest Surviving Film (1899)

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At first, film sim­ply record­ed events: a man walk­ing across a gar­den, work­ers leav­ing a fac­to­ry, a train pulling into a sta­tion. The medi­um soon matured enough to accom­mo­date dra­ma, which for ear­ly film­mak­ers meant sim­ply shoot­ing what amount­ed to stage pro­duc­tions from the per­spec­tive of a view­er in the audi­ence. At that stage, we could say, film still had­n’t evolved past sim­ple doc­u­men­tary pur­pos­es, hav­ing yet to incor­po­rate edit­ing, to say noth­ing of the oth­er qual­i­ties we now regard as char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly cin­e­mat­ic. This was­n’t a cul­tur­al mat­ter, but a tech­ni­cal one, as evi­denced by Momi­ji­gari, the old­est Japan­ese film in exis­tence.

Shot in 1899, Momi­ji­gari depicts near­ly four min­utes of a kabu­ki play involv­ing Onoe Kiku­gorō V and Ichikawa Dan­jūrō IX, two famous mas­ters of the form at the time. The idea was to pre­serve a record of their pres­ence on stage, no mat­ter how hap­haz­ard­ly or for how short a time, before they shuf­fled off this mor­tal coil.

It cer­tain­ly was­n’t too soon: both men would die in 1903, the year of the film’s first exhi­bi­tion. […]

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…