How Fritz Lang’s Metropolis Created the Blueprint for Modern Science Fiction (1927)

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A vast, mis­er­able pro­le­tari­at squan­ders its days in mean­ing­less toil. Soci­ety is under the con­trol of ultra-wealthy busi­ness mag­nates. In order to paci­fy the under­class, the rul­ing class pins its hopes on a tech­no­log­i­cal solu­tion: arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence. Wel­come to the year 2026, as envi­sioned in Fritz Lang’s Metrop­o­lis. When the film pre­miered, not long after…

What Did the Instruments in Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights Sound Like? Oxford Scholars Recreate Them

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Wel­come to The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights.

You’ll find no angel­ic strings here.

Those are reserved for first-class cit­i­zens whose vir­tu­ous lives earned them pas­sage to the upper­most heights.

Down below, stringed instru­ments pro­duce the most hell­ish sort of cacoph­o­ny, a fit­ting accom­pa­ni­ment for the horn whose bell is…

How Medieval Cathedrals Were Built Without Science, or Even Mathematics

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Sci­ence and engi­neer­ing may be con­flat­ed to some degree in the pub­lic mind, but any­one who’s spent much time in an aca­d­e­m­ic depart­ment belong­ing to one or the oth­er of those branch­es of endeav­or knows how insis­tent­ly dis­tinc­tions can be drawn between them. Bill Ham­mack, a pro­fes­sor of engi­neer­ing at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Illi­nois…

The Ingenious Engineering of Silk: How the 2,000-Year-Old Pattern Loom Powered the Silk Road and the Wealth of Ancient China

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The Silk Road’s long peri­od of high activ­i­ty spanned the sec­ond cen­tu­ry BC and the fif­teenth cen­tu­ry AD, but its name was­n’t coined until more than 400 years after that. Schol­ars have argued it prac­ti­cal­ly ever since, giv­en that the ref­er­ent was­n’t just one road but a vast and ever-chang­ing net­work of them, and…

Hear Aldous Huxley Read Brave New World. Plus 84 Classic Radio Dramas from CBS Radio Workshop (1956–57)

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We seem to be liv­ing through yet anoth­er major moment for pod­cast­ing. Over the past two decades, the medi­um has gone from niche exper­i­ment to main­stream habit, becom­ing a reg­u­lar part of how we learn, enter­tain our­selves, and pass the time. The pop­u­lar­i­ty of podcasts—in an age of ubiq­ui­tous screens and per­pet­u­al distractions—speaks to…