Take a Tour of 18th-Century London, Recreated with AI

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If you want to know what it was like to live in sev­en­teenth-cen­tu­ry Lon­don, read the diary of Samuel Pepys. While doing so, take note of his fre­quent ref­er­ences to the unclean­li­ness of the city’s streets: “very dirty and trou­ble­some to walk through,” “mighty dirty after the rain,” and dur­ing the large-scale rebuild­ing in…

Tom Jones Performs Prince’s “Purple Rain” Accompanied by Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour (1992)

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Over the decades, Tom Jones has per­formed with the best of them. In 1969, we can find him singing “Long Time Gone” with Cros­by, Stills, Nash & Young, and tak­ing them delight­ful­ly by sur­prise. The same goes for his duet with Janis Joplin in that same year. Now fast for­ward to the…

Göbekli Tepe: The 12,000-Year-Old Ruins That Rewrite the Story of Civilization

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We did­n’t have civ­i­liza­tion until we had cities, and we did­n’t have cities until we had agri­cul­ture. So, at least, goes a wide­ly accept­ed nar­ra­tive in “big his­to­ry” — a nar­ra­tive some­what trou­bled by the dis­cov­ery of ruins on Göbek­li Tepe, or “Pot­bel­ly Hill,” in south­east­ern Turkey. Appar­ent­ly inhab­it­ed from around 9500 to 8000…

Download 1300 Still Images from the Animated Films of Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli

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You may have seen every sin­gle one of Stu­dio Ghi­b­li’s ani­mat­ed films, going well beyond the Hayao Miyaza­ki-direct­ed My Neigh­bor Totoro, Spir­it­ed Away, and Kik­i’s Deliv­ery Ser­vice to the less wide­ly known but also charm­ing­ly craft­ed likes of Ocean Waves, My Neigh­bors the Yamadas, and The Cat Returns. Even so, the ques­tion remains: have…

The Earliest Known Customer Complaint Was Made 3,800 Years Ago: Read the Rant on an Ancient Babylonian Tablet

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Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

The site Fast Com­pa­ny pub­lished an arti­cle that describes the “Com­plaint Restraint project,” an ini­tia­tive that aims to cre­ate a “pos­i­tive life by elim­i­nat­ing neg­a­tive state­ments.” It’s an admirable goal. Though most of us have a per­verse love of wal­low­ing in our misery—a human trait ampli­fied a thou­sand­fold…