What Happens When Mortals Try to Drink Winston Churchill’s Daily Intake of Alcohol

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I have tak­en more out of alco­hol than alco­hol has tak­en out of me. — Win­ston Churchill

Win­ston Churchill had a rep­u­ta­tion as a bril­liant states­man and a prodi­gious drinker.

The for­mer prime min­is­ter imbibed through­out the day, every day.  He also burned through 10 dai­ly cig­ars, and lived to the ripe…

MTV Rewind Lets You Revisit 40,000 Music Videos & Commercials from the Golden Age of MTV

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MTV still exists. At least, it still exists in the Unit­ed States, or in cer­tain of that coun­try’s mar­kets, for the time being. A flur­ry of pre­ma­ture obit­u­ar­ies recent­ly blew through the inter­net after the announce­ment that the net­work had shut down in oth­er parts of the world, Europe includ­ed. But even there,…

Discover Michelangelo’s First Painting, Created When He Was Only 12 or 13 Years Old

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Think back, if you will, to the works of art you cre­at­ed at age twelve or thir­teen. For many, per­haps most of us, our out­put at that stage of ado­les­cence amount­ed to direc­tion­less doo­dles, chaot­ic comics, and a few unsteady-at-best school projects. But then, most of us did­n’t grow up to be Michelan­ge­lo.…

Download 435 High Resolution Images from John J. Audubon’s The Birds of America

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In our expe­ri­ence, bird lovers fall into two gen­er­al cat­e­gories:

Keen­ly obser­vant cat­a­loguers like John James Audubon …

And those of us who can­not resist assign­ing anthro­po­mor­phic per­son­al­i­ties and behav­iors to the 435 stars of Audubon’s The Birds of Amer­i­ca, a stun­ning col­lec­tion of prints from life-size water­col­ors he pro­duced between 1827…

When Pianist Maria João Pires Prepared to Perform the Wrong Mozart Concerto, Then Recovered Miraculously

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Imag­ine, if you will, tak­ing a seat at the piano before a full house of 2,000 music lovers ready to hear Mozart’s Piano Con­cer­to No. 20 in D minor — and, more impor­tant­ly, on stage with an orches­tra and con­duc­tor more than ready to play it. That would be dif­fi­cult enough, but now imag­ine that…