Hunter S. Thompson Sets His Christmas Tree on Fire, Nearly Burning His House Down (1990)

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It was some­thing of a Christ­mas rit­u­al at Hunter S. Thomp­son’s Col­orado cab­in, Owl Farm. Every year, his sec­re­tary Deb­o­rah Fuller would take down the Christ­mas tree and leave it on the front porch rather than dis­pose of it entire­ly. That’s because Hunter, more often than not, want­ed to set it on fire. In…

A Visual Timeline of World History: Watch the Rise & Fall of Civilizations Over 5,000 Years

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In the video above, Use­fulCharts cre­ator Matt Bak­er sug­gests that we not refer to the peri­od span­ning the fifth and the late fif­teenth cen­turies as the “dark ages.” In jus­ti­fi­ca­tion, he does­n’t put forth the argu­ment, now fair­ly com­mon, that the time in ques­tion was actu­al­ly full of sub­tle inno­va­tion occlud­ed by mod­ern prej­u­dice.…

Hear Debussy Play Debussy: A Vintage Recording from 1913

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A cen­tu­ry ago, the great French com­pos­er Claude Debussy sat down at a con­trap­tion called a Welte-Mignon repro­duc­ing piano and record­ed a series of per­for­mances for pos­ter­i­ty. The machine was designed to encode the nuances of a pianist’s play­ing, includ­ing ped­al­ing and dynam­ics, onto piano rolls for lat­er repro­duc­tion.

Debussy record­ed 14 pieces onto…

The Evil Genius of Fascist Design: How Mussolini and Hitler Used Art & Architecture to Project Power

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When the Nazis came to pow­er in 1933, they declared the begin­ning of a “Thou­sand-Year Reich” that ulti­mate­ly came up about 988 years short. Fas­cism in Italy man­aged to hold on to pow­er for a cou­ple of decades, which was pre­sum­ably still much less time than Ben­i­to Mus­soli­ni imag­ined he’d get on the throne. His­to­ry shows…

Why Coffee Makes You Go #2

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James Hoff­mann, the author of The World Atlas of Cof­fee and the cre­ator of a cof­fee-cen­tric YouTube chan­nel, can tell you many things about coffee—from how to roast cof­fee, to the tools and tech­niques need­ed to make espres­so, to the ulti­mate French Press tech­nique. Then he can also get into more tan­gen­tial­ly…