What’s Entering the Public Domain in 2026: Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, All Quiet on the Western Front, Betty Boop & More

‌

Though it isn’t the kind of thing one hears dis­cussed every day, seri­ous Dis­ney fans do tend to know that Goofy’s orig­i­nal name was Dip­py Dawg. But how many of the non-obses­sive know that Mick­ey’s faith­ful pet Plu­to was first called Rover? (We pass over in dig­ni­fied silence the qua­si-philo­soph­i­cal ques­tion of why the for­mer…

The Mystery of How a Samurai Ended up in 17th Century Venice

‌

It would­n’t sur­prise us to come across a Japan­ese per­son in Venice. Indeed, giv­en the glob­al touris­tic appeal of the place, we could hard­ly imag­ine a day there with­out a vis­i­tor from the Land of the Ris­ing Sun. But things were dif­fer­ent in 1873, just five years after the end of the sakoku pol­i­cy that all…

J. R. R. Tolkien Admitted to Disliking Dune “With Some Intensity” (1966)

‌

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qw_GaeJnoSI

One can eas­i­ly imag­ine a read­er enjoy­ing both The Lord of the Rings and Dune. Both of those works of epic fan­ta­sy were pub­lished in the form of a series of long nov­els begin­ning in the mid-twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry; both cre­ate elab­o­rate worlds of their own, right down to details of ecol­o­gy and…

Brian Eno’s Book & Music Recommendations

‌

If you’re a reg­u­lar lis­ten­er, you know that Ezra Klein wraps up his pod­cast inter­views with a famil­iar ques­tion: what three books would you rec­om­mend to the audi­ence? When Klein inter­viewed Bri­an Eno in Octo­ber, the pro­duc­er had these three books to offer.

First up was Print­ing and the Mind of Man,…

How Far Back in History Can You Start to Understand English?

‌

It’s easy to imag­ine the myr­i­ad dif­fi­cul­ties with which you’d be faced if you were sud­den­ly trans­port­ed a mil­len­ni­um back in time. But if you’re a native (or even pro­fi­cient) Eng­lish speak­er in an Eng­lish-speak­ing part of the world, the lan­guage, at least, sure­ly would­n’t be a prob­lem. Or so you’d think, until your first…