Did Tintin Creator Hergé Collaborate with the Nazis? A Historical Investigation

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The Adven­tures of Tintin may be a chil­dren’s com­ic series from mid-twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry Europe, but its appeal has long since tran­scend­ed the bound­aries of form, cul­ture, and gen­er­a­tion. In fact, many if not most seri­ous­ly ded­i­cat­ed fans of Tintin are in mid­dle age and beyond, and few of them can have avoid­ed ever con­sid­er­ing the ques­tion…

George Orwell’s Six Rules for Writing Clear and Tight Prose

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Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Most every­one who knows the work of George Orwell knows his 1946 essay “Pol­i­tics and the Eng­lish Lan­guage” (pub­lished here), in which he rails against care­less, con­fus­ing, and unclear prose. “Our civ­i­liza­tion is deca­dent,” he argues, “and our lan­guage… must inevitably share in the gen­er­al col­lapse.”…

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…