Meet the Forgotten Female Artist Behind the World’s Most Popular Tarot Deck (1909)

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As an exer­cise draw a com­po­si­tion of fear or sad­ness, or great sor­row, quite sim­ply, do not both­er about details now, but in a few lines tell your sto­ry. Then show it to any one of your friends, or fam­i­ly, or fel­low stu­dents, and ask them if they can tell you what it is…

How Saul Bass Designed the Strange Original Poster for Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining

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With Hal­loween just days away, many of us are even now ready­ing a scary movie or two to watch on the night itself. If you’re still unde­cid­ed about your own Hal­loween view­ing mate­r­i­al, allow us to sug­gest The Shin­ing, Stan­ley Kubrick­’s “mas­ter­piece of mod­ern hor­ror.” Those words come straight from the orig­i­nal poster hung…

74 Ways Characters Die in Shakespeare’s Plays Shown in a Handy Infographic: From Snakebites to Lack of Sleep

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In the grad­u­ate depart­ment where I once taught fresh­men and sopho­mores the rudi­ments of col­lege Eng­lish, it became com­mon prac­tice to include Shakespeare’s Titus Andron­i­cus on many an Intro to Lit syl­labus, along with a view­ing of Julie Taymor’s flam­boy­ant film adap­ta­tion. The ear­ly work is thought to be Shakespeare’s first tragedy, cob­bled…

Aldous Huxley to George Orwell: My Hellish Vision of the Future is Better Than Yours (1949)

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In 1949, George Orwell received a curi­ous let­ter from his for­mer high school French teacher.

Orwell had just pub­lished his ground­break­ing book Nine­teen Eighty-Four, which received glow­ing reviews from just about every cor­ner of the Eng­lish-speak­ing world. His French teacher, as it hap­pens, was none oth­er than Aldous Hux­ley,…

You Can Now See the Parthenon Without Scaffolding for the First Time in 200 Years

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If you’ve made the jour­ney to Athens, you prob­a­bly took the time to vis­it its most pop­u­lar tourist attrac­tion, the Acrop­o­lis. On that mon­u­ment-rich hill, you more than like­ly paid spe­cial atten­tion to the Parthenon, the ancient tem­ple ded­i­cat­ed to the city’s name­sake, the god­dess Athena Parthenos. But no mat­ter how much time you spent…