The Greek Mythology Family Tree: A Visual Guide Shows How Zeus, Athena, and the Ancient Gods Are Related

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It was long ago that poly­the­ism, as the sto­ry comes down to us, gave way to monothe­ism. Human­i­ty used to have many gods, and now almost every reli­gious believ­er acknowl­edges just one — though which god, exact­ly, does vary. Some pop­u­lar the­o­ries of “big his­to­ry” hold that, as the scale of a soci­ety grows larg­er,…

300,000 Wondrous Nature Illustrations Put Online by The Biodiversity Heritage Library

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Are we tru­ly in the midst of a human-caused sixth mass extinc­tion, an era of “bio­log­i­cal anni­hi­la­tion”? Many sci­en­tists and pop­u­lar sci­ence writ­ers say yes, using terms like “Holocene” or “Anthro­pocene” to describe what fol­lows the Ordovi­cian, Devon­ian, Per­mi­an, Tri­as­sic, and Cre­ta­ceous peri­ods. Peter Bran­nen, the author of extinc­tion his­to­ry The…

Discover Ichi-go Ichi‑e, the Japanese Art of Savoring Every Moment

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Each cul­ture has its own say­ings about the unique­ness and tran­sience of the present moment. In recent years, the Eng­lish-speak­ers have often found them­selves remind­ed, through the expres­sion “YOLO,” that they only live once. (The ques­tion of whether that should real­ly be “YLOO,” or “You Live Only Once,” we put aside for the time being.)…

J.R.R. Tolkien, Using a Tape Recorder for the First Time, Reads from The Hobbit for 30 Minutes (1952)

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Hav­ing not revis­it­ed The Hob­bit in some time, I’ve felt the famil­iar pull—shared by many readers—to return to Tolkien’s fairy-tale nov­el itself. It was my first expo­sure to Tolkien, and the per­fect book for a young read­er ready to dive into moral com­plex­i­ty and a ful­ly-real­ized fic­tion­al world.

And what bet­ter guide could…

When Two Filmmakers Make the Same Movie — and One of Them Is Werner Herzog

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In 1991, the French hus­band-and-wife vol­ca­nol­o­gist-film­mak­er team Mau­rice and Katia Krafft were killed by the flow of ash from the erup­tion of Mount Unzen in Nagasa­ki. Inex­plic­a­bly, Wern­er Her­zog did­n’t get around to mak­ing a film about them for more than 30 years. These would seem to be ide­al sub­jects for the doc­u­men­tary half of…