Read J. R. R. Tolkien’s “Letter From Father Christmas” To His Young Children (1925)

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J.R.R. Tolkien is best known for the sweep­ing fan­ta­sy land­scapes of Lord of The Rings and The Hob­bit. Apart from being a cel­e­brat­ed author, the Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty pro­fes­sor of Anglo-Sax­on was also a devot­ed father who dot­ed on his chil­dren.

In 1920, a few short years after Tolkien…

The Story Behind the Making of the Iconic Surrealist Photograph, Dalí Atomicus (1948)

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With his cane, his famous waxed mus­tache, and his habit of tak­ing unusu­al ani­mals for walks, Sal­vador Dalí would appear to have cul­ti­vat­ed his own pho­tographa­bil­i­ty. But tak­ing a pic­ture of the man who stood as a liv­ing def­i­n­i­tion of pop­u­lar sur­re­al­ism was­n’t a task to be approached casu­al­ly — espe­cial­ly not for

The Junky’s Christmas: William S. Burrough’s Dark Claymation Christmas Film Produced by Francis Ford Coppola (1993)

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Back in 1993, the Beat writer William S. Bur­roughs wrote and nar­rat­ed a 21-minute clay­ma­tion Christ­mas film odd­ly pro­duced by Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la. And, as you can well imag­ine, it’s not your nor­mal hap­py Christ­mas flick. Nope, this film – The Junky’s Christ­mas – is all about Dan­ny the Car­wiper, a junkie, who spends…

Richard Feynman Enthusiastically Explains How to Think Like a Physicist in His Series Fun to Imagine (1983)

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“It’s inter­est­ing that some peo­ple find sci­ence so easy, and oth­ers find it kind of dull and dif­fi­cult,” says Richard Feyn­man at the begin­ning of his 1983 BBC series Fun to Imag­ine. “One of the things that makes it very dif­fi­cult is that it takes a lot of imag­i­na­tion. It’s very hard to…

John Coltrane Draws a Picture Illustrating the Mathematics of Music

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Physi­cist and sax­o­phon­ist Stephon Alexan­der has argued in his many pub­lic lec­tures and his book The Jazz of Physics that Albert Ein­stein and John Coltrane had quite a lot in com­mon. Alexan­der in par­tic­u­lar draws our atten­tion to the so-called “Coltrane cir­cle,” which resem­bles what any musi­cian will rec­og­nize as the “Cir­cle…