Ten Lost Roman Wonders: The World’s Longest Tunnel, Tallest Dam, Widest-Spanning Bridge & More

‌

Apart from a few bridges that still work, the infra­struc­tur­al achieve­ments of the Roman Empire exist, for us, most­ly as ruins. With a lit­tle imag­i­na­tion, those his­toric sites give us a clear enough sense of the empire’s sheer might, but if we want to go deep­er, we should then look into the numer­ous Roman con­struc­tions…

David Lynch Being a Madman for a Relentless 8 Minutes and 30 Seconds

‌

Mad­man or vision­ary? A lit­tle of both? A genius? A brand? A men­sch? David Lynch was all these things and more, and this fan-made video above serves as a quick reminder of the career and the con­sis­ten­cy of the film director/artist/transcendental med­i­ta­tor who passed away last year.

Ear­ly in the video we see…

The Untold Story of Bauhaus Women: The Avant-Garde Artists Who Helped Shape Modernism

‌

It does­n’t take too long a look at the almost sur­re­al­is­ti­cal­ly clean-lined build­ings of Wal­ter Gropius to get the impres­sion that the man want­ed to ush­er in a new world, espe­cial­ly when you con­sid­er that many of them went up before World War II. Take the Bauhaus Dessau build­ing, which, though com­plet­ed exact­ly a…

How This Skyscraper Ruined Paris, and Why They’re Now Trying to Make It Invisible

‌

The play­wright Tris­tan Bernard is said to have eat­en lunch at the Eif­fel Tow­er every day, but not because he liked the menu in its café: rather, because it was the only place in Paris with no view of the Eif­fel Tow­er. His view wasn’t whol­ly eccen­tric in the decades after its con­struc­tion, in the…

Watch All of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons Performed on Original Baroque Instruments

‌

Anto­nio Vivaldi’s The Four Sea­sons reigns as one of the world’s most rec­og­niz­able ear­ly 18th-cen­tu­ry pieces, thanks to its fre­quent appear­ances in films and tele­vi­sion com­mer­cials.

Upon its debut in 1725, The Four Sea­sons stunned lis­ten­ers by telling a sto­ry with­out the help of a human voice. Vival­di drew on four exist­ing son­nets (pos­si­bly of his…