Why Do Filmmakers Call The Battle of Algiers the Greatest War Movie Ever?: Watch It Free Online

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Paul Thomas Ander­son­’s lat­est film, the loose Thomas Pyn­chon adap­ta­tion One Bat­tle After Anoth­er, serves up many a mem­o­rable scene. But for a cer­tain kind of cinephile, noth­ing — not the ter­ror­ist attacks, not the chas­es, not the swerves into askew com­e­dy — sticks in the mind quite so much as the moment in which…

The Oldest Known Depiction of Human Sexuality: The Turin Papyrus (Circa 1150 B.C.E.)

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Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

With the old joke about every gen­er­a­tion think­ing they invent­ed sex, List­verse brings us the papyrus above, the old­est depic­tion of sex on record. Paint­ed some­time in the Rames­side Peri­od (1292–1075 B.C.E.), the frag­ments above—called the “Turin Erot­ic Papyrus” because of their “dis­cov­ery” in the Egypt­ian…

The Unlikely Friendship of Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla

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Mark Twain was, in the esti­ma­tion of many, the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca’s first tru­ly home­grown man of let­ters. And in keep­ing with what would be rec­og­nized as the can-do Amer­i­can spir­it, he could­n’t resist putting him­self forth now and again as a man of sci­ence — or, more prac­ti­cal­ly, a man of…

Talking Heads’ David Byrne Performs a Tiny Desk Concert

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If you’ve seen a David Byrne con­cert in recent years, you know that he per­forms with a large ensem­ble of musi­cians, each car­ry­ing their own instru­ments across the stage, all while mov­ing in intri­cate­ly chore­o­graphed pat­terns. On his cur­rent tour, Byrne and his band stopped by NPR’s stu­dio and played a very dif­fer­ent kind of…

Inside Disney’s Long, Frustrated Quest to Create Artificial Human Beings: A Six-Hour Documentary

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For young chil­dren today, just as it was for gen­er­a­tions of their pre­de­ces­sors, noth­ing is quite so thrilling about their first vis­it to a Dis­ney theme park as catch­ing a glimpse of Mick­ey Mouse, Don­ald Duck, or anoth­er beloved char­ac­ter greet­ing them in real life. Cre­at­ing this mem­o­rable expe­ri­ence requires noth­ing more advanced than a…