Everything That Went Wrong During The Wizard of Oz’s Seriously Troubled Production

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The Wiz­ard of Oz is now show­ing at Las Vegas’ Sphere. Or a ver­sion of it is, at any rate, and not one that meets with the approval of all the pic­ture’s count­less fans. “The beloved 1939 film star­ring Judy Gar­land, wide­ly con­sid­ered one of the great­est Hol­ly­wood clas­sics, has been stretched and mor­phed…

Leonardo Da Vinci’s To-Do List from 1490: The Plan of a Renaissance Man

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Most people’s to-do lists are, almost by def­i­n­i­tion, pret­ty dull, filled with those quo­tid­i­an lit­tle tasks that tend to slip out of our minds. Pick up the laun­dry. Get that thing for the kid. Buy milk, canned yams and kumquats at the local mar­ket.

Leonar­do Da Vin­ci was, how­ev­er, no ordi­nary…

The Horrifying Paintings of Francis Bacon

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Men­tion Fran­cis Bacon, and you some­times have to clar­i­fy which one you mean: the twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry painter, or the sev­en­teenth-cen­tu­ry philoso­pher? Despite how much time sep­a­rat­ed their lives, the two men aren’t with­out their con­nec­tions. One may actu­al­ly have been a descen­dant of the oth­er, if you cred­it the artist’s father’s claim of rela­tion to…

The Earliest Known Appearance of the F‑Word (1310)

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Pho­to by Paul Booth

You val­ue deco­rum, pro­pri­ety, elo­quence, you trea­sure le mot juste and ago­nize over dic­tion as you com­pose polite but strong­ly-word­ed let­ters to the edi­tor. But alas, my lit­er­ate friend, you have the mis­for­tune of liv­ing in the age of Twit­ter, Tum­blr, et al., where the favored means of com­mu­ni­ca­tion…

The Technology That Brought Down Medieval Castles and Changed the Middle Ages

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Civ­i­liza­tion moved past the use of cas­tles long ago, but their imagery endures in pop­u­lar cul­ture. Even young chil­dren here in the twen­ty-twen­ties have an idea of what cas­tles look like. But why do they look like that? Admit­ted­ly, that’s a bit of a trick ques­tion: the pop­u­lar con­cept of cas­tles tends to be inspired…