The First Electric Guitar: Behold the 1931 “Frying Pan”

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The names Leo Fend­er and Les Paul will be for­ev­er asso­ci­at­ed with the explo­sion of the elec­tric gui­tar into pop­u­lar cul­ture. And right­ly so. With­out engi­neer Fend­er and musi­cian and stu­dio wiz Paul’s time­less designs, it’s hard to imag­ine what the most icon­ic instru­ments of decades of pop­u­lar music would look like.

They just…

The Surprising Power of Boredom: It Lets You Confront Big Questions & Give Life Meaning

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The twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry so far may seem light on major tech­no­log­i­cal break­throughs, at least when com­pared to the twen­ti­eth. An arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence boom (per­haps a bub­ble, per­haps not) has been tak­ing place over the past few years, which at least gives us some­thing to talk about. Before that, most of us would have named the…

The Genius Engineering of Roman Aqueducts

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We tend to think of the Roman Empire as hav­ing fall­en around 476 AD, but had things gone a lit­tle dif­fer­ent­ly, it could have come to its end much ear­li­er — before it tech­ni­cal­ly began, in fact. In the year 44 BC, for instance, the assas­si­na­tion of Julius Cae­sar and the civ­il wars rag­ing across…

The Night When Bob Dylan Went Electric: Watch Him Play “Maggie’s Farm” at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965

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The phrase “when Dylan went elec­tric” once car­ried as much weight in pop cul­ture his­to­ry as “the fall of the Berlin Wall” car­ries in, well, his­to­ry. Both events have reced­ed into what feels like the dis­tant past, but in the ear­ly 1960s, they like­ly seemed equal­ly unlike­ly to many a seri­ous Bob Dylan fan in…

78 Great Directors Who Shaped the History of Cinema: An Introduction

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When first we take an inter­est in movies, we must fig­ure out our own method of decid­ing what to watch next. The cen­tral fac­tor may be box office per­for­mance, the pres­ence of a favorite per­former, adher­ence to a favorite genre, or the use of a famil­iar sto­ry from oth­er media. Such paths through cin­e­ma can…